Delivery Bikers

Delivery bikers move across New York City. Moving between isolated spaces, they connect a fragmented urban landscape. Each rider is part of a dispersed yet interconnected system, revealing forms of coexistence based on movement, proximity, and separation.

Plastic bags used as protection against cold and rain, bright cubic backpacks, handlebars wrapped in tape. These improvised details form a visual language that identifies delivery bikers across New York City.

Since 2020, I have been portraying them while they work, building an ongoing series of encounters. Each rider is photographed in motion or during brief pauses between deliveries. I record their name, nationality, and a contact, so I can send them the image; with some, a relationship continues over time.

The project unfolds as a typological archive of individual presences that are at once autonomous and interconnected. Coming from different countries and backgrounds, many of the riders are recent arrivals, others more experienced. Some entered this work temporarily, others have made it a profession. Each carries a distinct story, yet all are part of the same dispersed system.

In a city structured by distance, separation, and unequal access, delivery bikers move continuously across boundaries; between neighborhoods, social conditions, and private interiors. They connect spaces that remain otherwise isolated, linking apartments, kitchens, and lives that rarely intersect directly.

Seen together, these portraits suggest a fragmented yet interconnected city: a constellation of individuals operating within a shared network, yet never fully belonging to the spaces they connect. Their presence points to a form of coexistence based on movement, proximity, and separation.