Documentary: All Eyes on NYCC

I was photographing the New York Comic Convention (NYCC) for a client but I was fascinated by the Cosplay participants who came to the convention in droves. What is Cosplay? It's a kind of performance art really, where people dress up in costumes like their favorite comic book, animae, animation, or other fantasy characters.Decked out in their costumes, some meticulously hand crafted, they walked the convention hall stopping to pose for photographs and admiring and being admired by fans and fellow Cosplayers. 

Fantasy,dress-up, costumes and masks. They all can serve to hide, to allow the wearer to pretend to be something or someone else. But masks and costumes can also be a means for projecting aspects of ourselves that we aspire to. Or aspects that we fear others won't see beyond our daily persona to recognize within us. 

Either way I wanted to see beyond the costume. To try to see what they might be trying to project, what they might be trying to hide. So I began photographing the eyes. All of the people I photographed were in costume.Sometimes the eyes were a part of that costume,sometimes not. Always they told me something...