Urban Grit Quotes

Philly gave me my ambition and drive to get more. It's a reminder to stay on top of my game. That's not a place I want to go back to.

Heart means something, especially in Gotham City, where the only thing worse than a scrub is someone devoid of that thumping sound inside the chest.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

In Belgium, we know the U.S. culture through the television, but it's not the truth. It's interesting to see that Philadelphia is really industrial. I love industrial cities. Everybody hates them, but I think they're the best places to be creative. The more gritty it is, the more I love it.

Chicago is a rough city. It made me raw.

I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

My toughness comes from just being from Philly, man.

The more traumatic events you endure with the city, the more of a New Yorker you become.

Reviewers said Ghost Country was rich, astonishing and affecting in the way it blended comedy, magic, and a gritty urban realism in a breathtaking ride along Chicago's mean streets.

There's something about Detroit, man: there's a serious vibe there. It could be that blue-collar, working-class-mentality person who lives out there. There's just something about it. It reminds me of Alaska. Texas has the same thing. Detroit is a little heavier than both.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

If you come from Jersey, you're tough. You've been through the grind.

I come from Detroit where it's rough and I'm not a smooth talker.

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me… the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.