New Intimacies is a photographic study situated in environments known for gay cruising and public sex. Taking influence from Peter Hujar and the photographs he created in the cruising areas around Manhattan’s meatpacking district in the 1970s and 1980s, these experimental images seek to envision the intangible and fleeting qualities of these geographic spaces. I wanted to make photographs that prompt consideration for the social and cultural elements that contributed to the formation of these sites as spaces of community and public intimacy. In the process, I began to combine portraiture and narrative compositions with abstract and non-figurative images to construct a grammar for the work. I visited cruising sites and made work in and around New York City and Fire Island, which has a long and storied history of queer life and sexual culture. I researched out-of-date guidebooks and fetish journals in search of historic public sex locations and I consulted their contemporary counterparts in dating and hookup apps. Leaving my camera at home, I frequented parks, cinemas, and underground clubs to observe and participate in what critic and queer theorist Leo Bersani describes as “an apprenticeship in impersonal intimacy.” I would later return to create photographs in the daytime hours, when the energy had shifted, and the composition of these geographies were void of their nocturnal features. The social immersion at night and in the day allowed me to feel the lingering essence of these moments, fragments of which I can only aspire to capture in these frames.