Something about sneaking up to the summits of skyscrapers and bridges, feeling the rush of the wind, the grip of the heights and the awe of the view, then making photographs that tried to capture the sensation, gave Isaac Wright an overwhelming sense of joy and freedom.
But not far into his photo career, the pursuit threatened to do the opposite.
Wright, who goes by the name Drift, is known for his dizzying images, often showing his legs dangling over thousands of feet of air. The photos are equal parts illicit Gen Z selfie and timeless barbaric yawp.
But when the police in his hometown, Cincinnati, saw them, they decided that he wasn’t an artist, but a menace — and a potentially violent one. They hunted him across several states, closed an interstate highway to trap him and jailed him. He was charged with multiple felonies that could have added up to 50 years in prison.
Maybe another artist, faced with decades behind bars, would have called it quits. Wright doubled down. He made bail, and even before the criminal cases were resolved, went right back to making photographs.
“I never stopped shooting, I never stopped climbing, not for a day,” he said on a recent morning as he walked out onto the roof of his studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn and looked at the Manhattan skyline. “The system had tried to convince me that I was wrong, and that wanting to do it was an illness. But I just never believed it.”
This month, Wright has his first solo gallery show in New York, at Robert Mann Gallery in Chelsea in Manhattan. A documentary about him is in the works. How he went from a jail cell to a successful career is a harrowing and at times bizarre saga that he says has deeply influenced how he works.
“Being locked up turned out to be a gift,” he said. “It was motivating. I couldn’t understand the freedom I was trying to express until I lost it all and was forced to fight for it.”
Wright, 29, grew up in a rough part of Cincinnati. His father spent time in prison. He was a hardworking student in high school, and enlisted in the Army in 2014, hoping to find a better life.
He became a paratrooper and was assigned to assist a chaplain in a Special Forces unit. After a deployment to the Middle East, the Army sent him to a battalion in Louisiana that had just returned from combat, and had no chaplain. As a 22-year-old sergeant, he took over many of the chaplain’s duties, guiding and consoling troubled soldiers. But it proved to be too much. Over the course of a summer, five from the battalion died by suicide.
Wright began to feel hopeless and stalked by the thought that he had failed. He feared there would be another suicide. The Army diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. He was searching for some kind of relief. Then, in 2018, he started to take photos as a hobby. One night, in downtown Houston, he was walking past the 75-story skeleton of one of the tallest buildings in Texas, decided there might be some cool shots from the top, and hopped a chain-link fence.
“I took the stairs all the way to the roof and just ended up sitting there for two or three hours, all by myself, taking in the view,” he recalled. “And this wave of catharsis and peace came over me. I was so present and alive, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what this is, but I have to keep doing it.”
Shooting became his therapy and his secret identity. During the week he was in uniform, ministering to other soldiers. On weekends he was slipping past security guards, making photos that tried to capture what he was experiencing on off-limits urban precipices, and posting them online under the handle @driftershoots.
He had a hard landing in parachute training that injured his ankle, and the Army medically discharged him in 2020. Out of uniform, he was free to inhabit his secret identity full-time. The day he got out, he packed camping equipment in an old Volvo, drove to a bridge spanning the Mississippi River, and slept on top of one of the suspension towers.
Over the next several weeks he climbed his way through Texas, California, Michigan and New York, paying his way by making mobile app food deliveries.
Wright began to see each mission as a kind of performance art. Each included the puzzle of slipping past locked doors and guards, the physicality of climbing, and the aesthetic challenge of visually capturing the experience.
There was also real danger and risk, both for himself and people below, should he slip. Early on, while trying to climb the Ambassador Bridge in Michigan, he edged his way along steel girders high above the Detroit River. Then he realized that to continue, he had to reach out for a cold metal ledge and do a pull-up above 150 feet of water.
“I was forced to make a choice,” he said. “How much do I want it? How much am I willing to risk for the experience? What were the consequences of doing it, versus living a life of having not done it?” He grabbed for the ledge.
In 2020, Wright was working his way to the roof of the highest building in Cincinnati when guards spotted him on security cameras. Dozens of police arrived with dogs and poured into the building. Wright, who had been trained by the Army in evasion, spotted the flashing lights of the squad cars far below, used a phone app to listen in on police radios, and took one stairway down while the officers headed up another.
He thought he had escaped clean, and a few days later he hit the road again to climb, unaware that the Cincinnati police had learned his identity from what they said was a @driftershoots sticker stuck on the building. A detective working the case pulled up the Instagram account and saw that the man he was after had not climbed one building, but dozens.
Instead of seeing a young veteran searching for meaning, the detective saw a habitual criminal. The Cincinnati police put out a nationwide warrant warning that the fugitive was likely armed and dangerous and set in motion a multistate manhunt.
The police finally nabbed him in Arizona by shutting down Interstate 40. Officers pulled him out of a car with assault rifles pointed at him from all directions while a helicopter hovered.
Prosecutors insisted on a $400,000 bond because, they said, he was high risk. A judge agreed. Unable to pay, Wright was in a cell 23 hours a day for four months.
Artists who use public spaces as their canvas often have had to pay a price to the legal system, but usually not a steep one.
The French artist Philippe Petit, who sneaked into the World Trade Center in 1974 and walked a tightrope between the towers, was charged with disorderly conduct and criminal trespass as soon as he stepped off the wire. But his punishment was light: He was required to perform for the children of New York in Central Park.
The Pop artist Keith Haring was arrested repeatedly for drawing on the subway walls and was often let off with minor fines. When a judge in 1986 fined him $25 for painting a giant “Crack is Wack” mural in East Harlem, he said he didn’t mind paying for getting to express himself.
But in street art, like in so many things, race often imposes its own cost. One of Haring’s friends, a fledging Black artist named Michael Stewart, was caught making graffiti in the subway in 1983, beaten by several white police officers, and died in a coma about two weeks later.
Police in Cincinnati seemed determined to come down hard on Wright. As he sat behind bars, the lead detective was alerting other cities of other building climbs. When a judge reduced Wright’s bail to $10,000 and he was able to get out, he learned that new charges were waiting in Louisiana. Then Kentucky. Then Michigan. Then Pennsylvania.
“I don’t know if Isaac wanting to climb stuff was so beyond the cops’ comprehension that they could only see it as dangerous, but it was clear they wanted to put this kid away for a long time,” said Laurence Haas, the lawyer who represented him in Ohio.
Wright, who is Black, became convinced that the severe police response was based, at least in part, on his race.
The courts did not agree with the police that Wright was a menace. In four states he had charges reduced to simple misdemeanors or dismissed entirely. In Ohio, a judge agreed to give him a deferred felony conviction probation if he promised to go to therapy and stay out of trouble.
A short time later, Wright’s photos got swept up in the NFT craze and started selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Before long, the veteran who had spent months in jail, unable to afford bail, had earned about $10 million.
He donated $500,000 to a charity that provides bail to people who can’t afford it. He also bought a Porsche.
Then he kept climbing: Paris, Oslo, Cairo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, China and many of the tallest buildings in Manhattan, including the Empire State Building and The New York Times headquarters in Midtown.
It was a violation of his probation, but he said he simply could not stop. The experience of being jailed had not quashed his desire, giving it instead a new urgency.
Wright is part of a generation of self-taught photographers who grew up with a camera in their pocket, and largely circumvented the traditional art and photography worlds by creating an audience online, said Lyle Rexer, a critic who has written extensively about photography and self-taught artists.
Wright’s photos try to capture both courage and transgression, and the challenge of being young and Black, while at the same time always trying to do something beautiful, Rexer said.
“He has a new way of giving us what photography always has promised: to take us to places we can’t go on our own, and in some cases into lives we can’t even imagine on our own, to somehow show us that thing we can’t quite see,” he said. “I think that’s really wonderful.”
Drift: Coming Home
May 15 to June 28. Robert Mann Gallery, 508 West 26th Street; 212-989-7600, robertmann.com.
Dave Philipps writes about war, the military and veterans and covers The Pentagon.
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