ICP Teen Academy

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Oliver Levinson



I am not religious, but I want to use photography to show people as God might see them, with their flaws and struggles, but an inherent goodness and a pure desire to find the right path. I want to portray what I think of as their souls. The subjects of my photos are the friends I hang out with, often in Tompkins Square Park or around the East Village. I seek to capture the feelings I have about my friend group, and about the places that connect us. This group of kids might appear as ragged as the surrounding tenement buildings and chaotic urban scene. But I hope to show that there is more than meets the eye, in both these people and their environment: beauty, community, and even grace. Particularly through my use of color, I highlight specific feelings about a person or a place. I take influence from Wong Kar Wai, Christopher Doyle, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, and Dash Snow.

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Oliver Levinson is a teenage photographer who grew up in Greenwich Village, NYC. He has previously taken photographs of urban landscapes, trying to show the beauty in the environments where ordinary people live and work. Oliver also takes photos of his friends interacting with the city. He primarily uses a smartphone or a digital camera to create images, editing them in Adobe Lightroom often to an analog street photography effect. He is currently enrolled in the International Center of Photography’s Imagemakers program, and previously participated in photography classes at Parsons School of Art and Design, and the Grace Church School.