Ryan Weideman American, b. 1941

Ryan Weideman (b. 1941) spent thirty-six years driving a New York City taxi, photographing the passengers who entered his cab. From 1980 to 2016, he worked the night shift, from five in the evening until five in the morning, three or four nights a week. With a strobe mounted on the driver’s visor and his camera directed toward the back seat, Weideman created an extraordinary portrait of the city after dark. His subjects—club kids and poets, drag queens and businessmen, models, sex workers, celebrities, and strangers—formed a cross-section of New York’s nocturnal life. The taxi became his mobile studio, and the resulting photographs constitute both an intimate record of human encounters and a compelling portrait of a city that has largely disappeared.

Born in Oklahoma, where his grandfather operated a livery service, Weideman earned a BA in photography and printmaking from California State University, Long Beach, in 1973, followed by an MFA in the same disciplines from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1975. He moved to New York in 1980 with the ambition of becoming a street photographer, settling into a tenement apartment on West 43rd Street. Within a month of his arrival, a neighbor who drove a taxi invited him to accompany him on a shift. Weideman soon obtained his own taxi license, discovering an unconventional means of pursuing his photographic practice. Influenced by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Mark Cohen, he found in the spacious, seven-passenger Checker cab an opportunity to move beyond the observational distance of street photography and engage directly with his subjects. After six or seven years of photographing his passengers, Weideman began incorporating himself into the compositions, transforming the images into double portraits that captured the relationship between driver and fare. These photographs reveal fleeting moments of intimacy, spontaneity, and unexpected connection between strangers sharing a confined space. Among his notable passengers was the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose portrait is now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Throughout his years behind the wheel, Weideman developed and printed his photographs in a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of his apartment. In 1991, Thunder’s Mouth Press published In My Taxi: New York After Hours, bringing his distinctive body of work to a wider audience. Following his retirement from driving, he spent several years traveling across the United States with a portable photographic studio, creating portraits of veteran taxi drivers and extending his exploration of the profession and its community.

Weideman has maintained a relationship with Bruce Silverstein Gallery for more than two decades, beginning with In My Taxi (2002), his first solo exhibition at the gallery, followed by Cab Culture (2004). His photographs were featured in the traveling exhibition In My Taxi 1980–2012 at Espronceda in Barcelona in 2017, as well as in the gallery's group exhibitions REWIND (2021) and In Sequence (2025). Weideman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 1992, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1986–87), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984–85). His photographs and lithographs are represented in numerous public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California.