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Sensual Slow-Motion Portraits Breathe New Life into Street Photography

Jeff Hodsdon’s gives new flourishes to street photography.

This article originally appeared on The Creators Project. 

There are only so many ways you can capture images of people on the street, but artist Jeff Hodsdon is creating his own stylized aesthetic when it comes to urban portraiture. The artist's project,  The Moments, fuses slow-motion videos captured with a customized iPhone lens with Hodsdon's impeccable eye for finding NYC's compelling denizens, resulting in a highly addictive daily image blog.

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The artist's short videos have an atmospheric haziness to them that provide them with an immersive, dream-like quality. This is in no small part due to Hodsdon's unique setup for shooting, which involves an iPhone embedded with a custom-made adapter that allows the artist to attach a fully-fledged 35mm lens where the phone's generic lens normally lies.

A software engineer by day, Hodsdon built his own custom software to condense quick shots into drawn out, slow-motion glimpses of on-the-go New Yorkers. Now in the second year of updating  The Moments,Hodsdon originally started the project after feeling unsatisfied with the current state of image-making. "I was discontent with pictures of people on screens. I saw myself and others viewing a lot of photographs on screens. Yet, they were photos from cameras from an era with paper," the artist tells The Creators Project. "It didn't make sense to me why they couldn't be more. I want a portrait to bring a viewer closer to the subject, for that viewer to have a greater understanding and feel closer to someone else."

"I like to think there is a type of photograph that is in between stills and film. I find that not a lot happens in one second of time—but enough happens to give a viewer a greater feeling of connection," Hodsdon continues. "Sometimes when people laugh, their shoulders go up a little. A still photograph won't capture that movement. I want my work to celebrate people more honestly and tell more about them than a static image would."

View the near-daily updates of  The Momentson the project's Instagram account. For more of Jeff Hodsdon's moving portraiture, visit his website.