On Feeling
Adato, a documentary photographer, had been living in Manhattan’s Chinatown since 2019 before he met Zeiger, a creative director and stylist with a background in fashion and a passion for storytelling. Upon meeting, the two realized that collaborating was only a matter of time. Fusing Adato’s affinity for questioning societal norms and Zeiger’s attraction to the esoteric and fantastical, the two poised themselves to reshape the status quo.
To start, Adato and Zeiger looked inward and thought about how as foreigners to a new city, they presented an unfiltered version of themselves to others. The duo felt that the new decade, 2020, offered a chance to do something different. To put forth something intimate. The pair decided to produce a project that touches on the past, present, and future in relation to their hopes, and dreams. They blended identity and melted internal boundaries via a series of questions asked to a cast of creatives.
Zeiger and Adato began casting friends and strangers to take part in this quasi-social experiment for their short film and photo series. “We wanted to observe what naturally happens between strangers brought together by chance,” Zeiger shares. Curious about why self-conscious behavior and overthinking is less likely to occur between strangers, and in this scenario, evaporates entirely.
Their cast, a melange of strangers of varying ethnicities and gender, gathered one afternoon on a rooftop in Chinatown. When asked how participants were chosen, Adato, smiling, explained, “We were drawn to the people whose inner beauty, energy, and aura was able to touch us in a unique way.” For Adato, the group of people mirrored the culmination of his time in New York, a mix of chance encounters, memories, and intimate moments with strangers and ultimately, himself.
Strangers, with their respective dimensions came together and created a new reality. A kaleidoscope of intention pushed the limits of the subconscious while new found truths slowly reached both individual and collective surfaces. The result, a finetuning and in some cases, a reimagining of perspectives.
