Learning How you can See: H&A alum, Olga Ginzburg’s great distance into pictures

In 2025, CCNY alumna Olga Ginzburg (‘15) was chosen for the esteemed Dear New York: Humans of New York exhibition in Grand Central Station for her neighborhood documentary undertaking on Staten Island, Encounters. In addition to her documentary work, Ginzburg now works as a full-time freelance editorial photographer, with bylines and assignments for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NPR, and the New York Post. 

But her journey didn’t start with early success, and even with a rigorously mapped plan. It started with uncertainty. In early maturity, pictures was much less a profession trajectory than an anchor. Ginzburg got here to pictures effectively exterior of academia. She had already dropped out of faculty and spent her early years looking for her voice. She discovered it in pictures, lengthy earlier than she imagined it as a occupation.” By the time she arrived at CCNY in her late twenties, pictures had already turn out to be a manner of orienting herself on the planet. It is exactly this nonlinear path that provides Ginzburg’s work its specific richness. Her story, marked by detours, pauses, and returns, in the end led her right into a deeply fulfilling vocation that’s way over only a job.

Ginzburg fell in love with pictures years earlier than she ever picked up a digital camera. She wandered museums, flipped by photobooks, and immersed herself in cinema—experiences she now acknowledges as her first academics, even when she didn’t realize it on the time. Photography, she says, has a manner of fixing notion. By steeping herself in nice works, historic and up to date, she realized methods to see earlier than speeding to make photographs of her personal.

Her transition from seeking to making was not as solitary because it started. She recollects her first pictures class at Cooper Union round 2008–9 as a pivotal second. After that coloration analog class, she was hooked and instantly continued her research on the Educational Alliance, a uncommon, reasonably priced, community-based artwork house. There, she expanded her technical information by black-and-white moist darkroom programs, discovered mentorship with Azikiwe Mohammad, and shortly transitioned from scholar to salon participant to teacher. When the Educational Alliance darkroom closed, she felt able to pursue a extra formal schooling, and that path led her to the Art Department at City College.

It wasn’t that Ginzburg rejected larger schooling outright; relatively, she wanted time—time to develop, to mature, to turn out to be prepared. Entering the classroom as an older scholar proved to be a significant path she by no means may have drawn up for herself. “City College cracked my skull open in the best way,” Ginzburg explains. “I fell in love not just with the Art Department, but with everything. I felt taken seriously there.” She started her research towards a BA in Studio Art with a focus in pictures, however was equally enamored by CCNY’s broader curriculum, from world civilizations to astrophysics. Any preliminary self-consciousness rapidly gave method to a way of belonging, bolstered by mentorship from school members together with Liz Kerr, Becca Albee, Jennifer Williams, and Maria Politaris. “Having professors believe in you like that,” she displays, “it makes you take yourself more seriously.”

One of essentially the most formative experiences of her time at CCNY was her participation within the Connor Study Abroad Fellowship, which totally funded an immersive semester in Paris. There, she was trusted with assets and given the uncommon alternative to shoot pictures full-time. It was in Paris that her avenue pictures took root, work that may later inform her shift towards portraiture. For Ginzburg, the expertise was not merely journey: it was affirmation.

Ginzburg left her childhood house on Staten Island as a young person, fueled by an pressing need to flee. But after getting back from Paris and graduating from CCNY, she felt compelled to return—this time with a special perspective. The visible and sensory contrasts with Manhattan remained: American suburbia, coastal tradition, acquainted rhythms. Yet the place had modified. And so had she.

She returned not as a wandering teenager, however as a photographer, stepping again onto a publish–Hurricane Sandy panorama with new eyes. When she started photographing there, she encountered an expertise as distinct because the borough itself. “It’s not Manhattan,” she explains. “You can’t just grab a photo and disappear. By necessity you have to stop, talk to people, get to know them—and that changed everything.” Her early portraits have been marked by nerves and vulnerability, however she got here to know shyness not as a barrier, however as a part of the work. Through this act of bearing witness, she started what would turn out to be a decade-long dedication to neighborhood storytelling. Her ongoing undertaking, Encounters, started in 2016 and now approaches its tenth yr. The work blends documentary pictures, portraiture, and neighborhood narrative right into a layered visible document. Though Ginzburg has since moved again to Manhattan, Staten Island continues to exert a strong pull on her creativeness, and he or she stays dedicated to the undertaking with the intention of manufacturing a ebook. Images from Encounters have been later chosen for Dear New York, the Humans of New York exhibition.

When Humans of New York launched an open name, it was one in every of Ginzburg’s college students who inspired her to use. She was in the end chosen as a part of a small group of photographers to exhibit in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Station. “To suddenly have a much wider audience than I ever would have otherwise—it was overwhelming in the best way,” she recollects. “It was one of the great honors of my life. To see people stop, look, and spend time with the work—that’s the most rewarding feeling.”

Alongside her portraiture, Ginzburg has now accomplished her first full yr as a contract editorial photographer. Like many freelancers, she has skilled the feast-and-famine cycles of the work, navigating tensions between velocity and perfection, deadlines and private tasks, all whereas carrying the emotional labor inherent in human-interest reporting. “I had to try it to know,” she says. “And even with the stress, I realized I’m well-suited for editorial photography, for being part of the storytelling.”

Ginzburg doesn’t see herself as having “arrived.” There is not any end line in artistic work. Still, she takes real pleasure in her progress, her accomplishments, and the alternatives she has been given. She continues to refine her manner of seeing: a follow that started years in the past in museums and photobooks. CCNY, she displays, not solely ready her for the work forward, however stays an enduring house base, one which continues to form her current as a lot as her previous.

 

Learn extra about Olga Ginzburg’s work right here: