How Photographer Evan Joseph Captures New York City’s Inner Beauty
by David Hay
April 2025
Evan Joseph’s eye shapes the way we see New York City.
As one of very few photographers with a contract to shoot the city from above, Evan has captured majestic images from all its tallest perches—Top of the Rock, Summit One Vanderbilt, and One World Observatory, to name a few.
“No shoot at this height is ever the same,” he says. “The skyline can be quite different, the particles in the air change what you can see. And there’s the weather itself, the time of day.”
Even apart from these quotidian considerations involved in getting The Shot, there’s something else that Evan contends with, something almost mystical.
“Making these images never fails to challenge me to consider and reflect on the sublime,” he says.
It’s no wonder: Evan has been an eyewitness to an extraordinary period in the city’s history.
“The skyline has exploded during my two-decade career,” he says. “For a long period, beginning after the skyscraper competitions of the 1930s, it had subsided, remained static. But thanks to new engineering and the desire to make an architectural statement, it’s exploded. It’s never been more exciting. I count myself lucky to be able to chronicle this.”
His high-altitude work notwithstanding, Evan is perhaps more renowned as the foremost chronicler of what’s beneath the city’s famous spires and observatories: the imaginative, personal, and often extravagant interiors he enables us to see thanks to commissions for high-end magazines and real estate clients—notably, Douglas Elliman among them.
His camera has provided a window on the lives and personalities of many a private New Yorker, feeding our insatiable yearning to peek inside. With a list of celebrity clients runs from Annie Leibovitz to Zendaya, Evan has mediated much of what we know about “interior New York.”
Since starting out on his own back in 2001, not long after September 11th, Evan has built a multi-faceted career with few equals, and he credits Douglas Elliman with helping him begin that journey with an early commission to photograph each Manhattan neighborhood. The resulting photographs of Hudson Heights, Turtle Bay, and other places he’d only known by name are still in use at the brokerage to this day. Thus began a long-term relationship with Elliman agents and development marketing executives who turn to Evan and the eight other gifted photographers at Evan Joseph Studio to create the defining images that constitute a visual record of the city we love.
A lived-in still life
In person, Evan is instantly engaging: he gives you his full attention, focusing directly on you with his photographer’s eye. He brings this same focus to any space he photographs, especially when it’s an editorial or magazine commission. On these jobs, Evan prefers to ease into a space, perhaps sit there for a while. He needs to take it in, to discover its personality, its relationship with its owner or caretaker, the elements that make it tick.
Inevitably, he’ll discover something, often an artifact, such as the stack of notecards on a bedside table in Joan Rivers’s apartment, which he photographed after the comic legend had passed away. On each of the cards was a famous name accompanied by a joke that Rivers was trying out.
“Having that in an image told you so much about how she lived,” Evan recalled.
Such visual signifiers, while of great interest to artists and voyeurs alike, are mostly rare in design photography, where an overt human presence is often unwelcome. They have to be detected amid the fabric and design of a house or an apartment. They’re hard to capture; impossible when you don’t take the time to discern first what it is.
“You have to create the experience of being in the space for yourself,” he says.
That’s just the beginning.
“One of the keys to achieving a good photograph is composition,” says Evan, whose career as an artist began as a painter with a particular fondness for still life subjects. (He’s never stopped painting.) After he’s taken in what’s in front of him, he sets to work on how to compose his shots. “I shift things around until the symmetry within the frame and the relationships between shapes and objects all fit together. It all needs to become one.”
In practice, this means moving a lot of things around—Evan estimates that 80 percent of his work is devoted to “pre-shoot re-arrangement.”
“It’s like working on a full-scale still life!”
(Clockwise from top left): A favorite shot of the Chrysler Building from a helicopter; an interior shot from 20 East 10th Street, former home of Sarah Jessica Parker; the observatory of Summit One Vanderbilt. (Courtesy of Evan Joseph Studio)
The tyranny of the wide-angle lens
The pursuit of the perfect design image, however, is not what keeps the lights on at Evan Joseph Studio. That’s where the ongoing real estate and marketing commissions come in. For Evan, they are an invitation to a world he finds endlessly fascinating.
He recounts walking into Lenny Kravitz’s apartment down from Gramercy Park and encountering the 4” shag carpeting, dark chocolate walls, black ceilings, and mink throw rug on the living room sofa (all later removed when the apartment was re-painted white in order to secure a sale). While shooting the bedroom of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, he noted the periodical on the bedside table—with a postal label addressed to the magazine subscriber Rupert Murdoch.
Evan quickly reminds me that image-making in the professional real estate world has different concerns. For an agent, marketing a home or apartment is about showing it off, which often involves emphasizing—at times, exaggerating—the dimensions of its rooms, kitchen, and baths. At the top end of the market, where “grand house” properties increasingly feature a panoply of extraordinary amenities—the glass-walled walk-in closet, the “car museum,” etc.—it can be a challenge to delineate those actual spaces. It’s a new challenge he’s up for, but he has some qualms about the way these features are often photographed.
“Because the emphasis is always to capture size—to exaggerate dimension—these photos are usually taken using a wide-angle lens,” he says, noting their ubiquity on sites like StreetEasy. “And often they’ll later have extensive light blown in before they are transferred to a visual platform.”
While he well understands the pressures of marketing, he does not consider the wide-angle lens to be the architectural photographer’s friend.
“It proves much more limited in terms of your compositional choices, as you’ll end up with a lot of ceiling, a lot more floor, and only the middle third is left to be interesting visually,” he says, adding that this can distort scale, de-emphasize formal structure, and eliminate the contrasts in light that make it pleasurable to be in an interior space.
Happily, Evan finds clients are increasingly wary of this type of imagery. He’s gotten a number of commissions from sellers who “second shots” because they weren’t happy with the initial, more standard images.
“Many, especially those who closely follow such publications as Architectural Digest and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, want those carefully composed, visually arresting images for the sale of their homes,” he tells me. “They think such images will attract a more sophisticated group of buyers.”
Another trend Evan has seen the return of verticality and proportionality to residential image-making, driven by the dominance of Instagram, TikTok, and other mobile-first platforms.
“A vertical image on Instagram will occupy 75% of someone’s phone screen,” he notes. “A more horizontal image, the product of the wide-angled approach, will only take up 30% of their screen.”
Although Evan is wholly invested in his practice, he is also mindful of his illustrious forebears—we bonded over the pioneering work of Julius Shulman, whose photographs of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler’s work established Modernism as a major architectural and design force in Southern California.
Indeed, the dedication to design and passion for the practice of image-making that he shares with the other photographers in his studio ensure that Evan Joseph’s eye will continue to shape how we see the space we occupy.
David Hay is a well-known architectural writer and playwright. His stories have been featured in The New York Times, Dwell and New York.
Related STORIES
