Jason Polan’s New York

Jason Polan book

You may recognize Jason Polan’s often wacky, always charming drawings from our newsletter emails. But the artist, whose illustrations have also been published in the New Yorker,Metropolis, and the New York Times, has his sights set on more than just movies. Every Person in New York, the first volume of a project Polan’s been working on for more than seven years, is available now from Chronicle Books and features drawings of over 30,000 people he’s observed around the city, along with a foreword by Kristen Wiig. Speediness is key to Polan’s art’s authenticity—he draws his subjects only for as long as he can see them. “If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that had been folded or an arm pointing,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg—it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.” We think it does.

Polan sent us some images from the book of a few Criterion-related folks he saw around the city. Check them out below.

Gena Rowlands and Wes Anderson
Chris Hegedus and Chantal Akerman by Polan

You have no items in your shopping cart