Devlin Claro’s Dreamlike Portrait of Queens

Set in the “middle world” of Queens, Devlin Claro’s new exhibition, Crushing, is an inspired portrait of the borough as a microcosm for the rest of America

In a new exhibition at Donald Ryan Gallery in New York, photographer Devlin Claro shares his latest body of work, Crushing, a series of carefully staged photos that depict his version of America, shot in the city and its surrounding outer boroughs – in parking lots, on street corners, surrounded by municipal buildings and civic bridges.

For the photographer, a fourth-generation New Yorker who was born and raised in Queens, the borough is a microcosm for the rest of the country as it evolves continually. His images, some of which were recently featured in a major survey exhibition at MoMA PS1, subtly register the city’s tensions: economic boom and instability, surveillance following 9/11 and life on the internet. 

Claro describes Queens as “the middle world”, neither peripheral nor central, familiar yet indeterminate. “Statistically, Queens is one of the most ethnically diverse boroughs in the whole world. Everyone is on top of each other and so by nature it’s like America at its best,” he says. “I’ve never really been anywhere else, not for any real length of time, so this is my America. It’s a stage for the rest of America.”

The exhibition’s title is multifaceted. “It’s about being crushed, crushing it, crushing on someone. Crushing is a very physical sensation, at times an overwhelm.” Claro’s photos, developed out of his home darkroom in Flushing, tell fictionalised stories, prompted by scenes from works of art and photography and authorless images he’s seen on Tumblr, personalised to represent pockets of his world. “I like to think of it as sampling, the way one might when making music,” he says, before showing me a photo of a young girl filming in a park with a camcorder, a framing sampled from Paul Gauguin’s 1888 painting Vision After the Sermon: “I started photography much like her, out with a camera at 12 years old.” 

“I love Tumblr,” says Claro, who was born in 1995. “I grew up on it. It’s at once this very valuable visual resource and at the same time, this evil thing that shows you an abundance of imagery with no reference, no author, and no context. But for better or worse, being a teenager at that time, my sensibility has been shaped by it.” In many ways, this informed the series, inspiring him to sample from, personalise and restage other pre-existing images. “Making sense of the abundance of imagery by making it relative to my world.”  

Claro’s outer borough New York is neither utopian or dystopian. It’s not romanticised and it’s not documentarian. In many ways it’s not even America. “Even if there’s still conflict, poverty, racism, and ritual too, I can’t claim to examine the rest of the country, because my America is a micro-pocket” – of which there are many across America and the world – “each with its own set of particular and peculiar people, behaviours and phenomenons.” Crushing becomes a study of this: an erratic amalgam symbolic of an erratic city. 

A defining feature in Claro’s photos is a sense of ambiguity surrounding time. Fashion, props, accessories and architecture are indicative of a moment post-millenium, but when exactly is unclear. “Crocs, Pokemon, a camcorder – it could be the early 2000s or it could be 2030,” he says. 

One image sees two people in a parking lot outside a disused Toys R Us, a nod to Justine Kurland’s 1998 photograph of the same name. “The spectre of logos and ugly graphic designs are very much a part of our natural American landscape,” he says, making it a point to incorporate things others may consider gimmicky. “Where does good taste meet bad taste? Where can we abandon taste altogether?” 

Another image depicts a ghost gun, a 3D printed single-fire weapon made using an untraceable file that can be downloaded from the dark web. “The file is like 6 megabytes. It’s pretty menacing,” says Claro. “It can fire one bullet at close range with enough force to kill somebody.” He juxtaposes this with an image of a cowboy as a symbol of the “centuries-old American ideal”.

“I worked with Mark Fisher’s ideas about the future being cancelled, and ghosts,” says the photographer. “My generation has to contend with a lot, political urgencies, many of which are an accumulation of movements past, others destined to be co-opted and sold back to us – like the punk movement was.” 

He also revisits the last century, featuring the orange hue of New York’s post-war sodium vapour street lights, which are being replaced across the city by LED lights. “Sodium vapour street lights made the night lighting really warm, but LEDs are bright and white and supposedly they’re better for driving. Really they’re better for surveillance,” he says. “LEDs feel like a post-2000 thing.” The result of using this lighting is contrast; a sort of modern-day black and white. “When you have a deep orange in a photograph, any blue in the background will become intensified. Blue and orange are also the New York Knicks’ colours.” 

“America doesn’t really have its own solid identity, and anyone who thinks it does is really misguided. In America’s amorphism is hybridity, and New Yorkers are really used to that idea,” he says. “It wasn’t until I got older that I realised how strange this country is. On the one hand, I am exhausted with it and yet I also have hope for the potential there is for living well together. I want people to look at my photos and think about how strange and rich and bad and good America is.”

Devlin Claro: Crushing is on show at Donald Ryan Gallery in New York until 13 June 2026.