In 1993-1994, Moyra Davey was photographing newsstands on the streets of New York. She writes:
"I became interested in newsstands partly as an extension of a project I undertook while traveling, where I recorded actual newspapers on a daily basis, and partly from looking at and feeling inspired by Atgetʼs photographs of Paris.
"As structures, newsstands seem anachronistic in the way that, ninety years before, many of Atgetʼs subjects were also on the verge of disappearing—yet what they dispense is what is most “of the moment” and ephemeral (newspapers, lottery tickets, racing forms, etc.). Newsstands are from the age of paper, soon to be eclipsed by microchip technology, and as I photograph these little dark rooms on the streets I canʼt help but be reminded of, and see the analogy between, other small, dark rooms which also traffic in paper products, and seem equally stranded in the machine age—namely photographersʼ laboratories and darkrooms.
"Since undertaking this project I have come to experience the city in odd ways, as though it were a stage, or, the proverbial “scene of a crime,” as Walter Benjamin said of Atgetʼs photographs. Finally, I have become someone who waits and watches, focused on certain choice examples of that which I may not have noticed a year ago but with which I am now obsessed. The documentary ethic can sometimes feel at odds with the growing single-mindedness of the collector, although at their best both may reinvest their objects with a revelatory insight.
These, and other ideas constitute a sketch of some of the terms in which this project, still evolving, continues to define itself" (1994).