Stacey Baker: New York Legs

For the past three years, Stacey Baker has been photographing women’s legs in New York City and posting the pictures on Instagram, where she has over 75,000 followers. The women are strangers she meets on the street who agree to pose in front of a nearby wall. Only their legs are visible in the frame: She always frames them so the subject is cut off at the waist. She rigorously stages these photographs, asking the muse to stand in front of a gritty, textured wall, and composing each image so the heels line up with the horizon line where the wall meets the chewing-gum-pocked sidewalk, and always framing it so the thin strip of pavement takes up about a sixth of the picture. By following this disciplined approach, Baker has figured out a way to commandeer a portrait studio out of the chaos of midtown Manhattan. (Kathy Ryan).

The images, viewed collectively, reflect the diversity of the female figure and also reflect the personality of each subject as well as the fashion of the moment: leggings, miniskirts, jeans, etc. Many of the pictures were taken on West 40th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, near where Baker works as a photo editor at The New York Times Magazine, often during her lunch hour.