As a photographer for The Times, I’ve traveled the country covering political campaigns, national and local. I had lived in New York for 14 years, and then during the pandemic, like so many, I left. Last month, I returned to the city to follow nine Democratic mayoral candidates on their campaign trails, ahead of the June 24 primary. The post-pandemic city that I returned to seemed gritty and alive, but clouded with a heightened sense of danger.
Cops were stationed in subways across the boroughs. On a single day, I saw three street fights break out. The city felt neglected, somehow, as though it were a backyard that had been allowed to grow wild for a little too long. On a Tuesday after a press conference outside City Hall, I observed a colony of rats scurrying around the grounds. An apt, but perhaps too-on-the-nose metaphor for the state of politics in the city.
For eight days, from early morning to late evening, I shadowed the candidates as they campaigned throughout the city’s five boroughs. My step counter got a good workout as I clocked in an average of nine miles each day. Despite New York’s image as a center of wealth and power, the battle for its leadership felt intensely local, as though it were a small-town race.
I stood outside a grocery store in my old neighborhood on the Upper West Side as Scott Stringer handed out fliers to passers-by. I boarded the Staten Island Ferry with Zohran Mamdani, as we departed a conservative borough often neglected in Democratic primaries. I watched Zellnor Myrie sit through an hourlong tenants meeting with residents of the Bronx’s Tracey Towers, half of which was spent discussing complaints about a dog that had created havoc after being let off its leash.
Returning to the city after several years was both inspiring and unsettling. New Yorkers share the little space they have, and accept it with stoic grace. I always had a love-hate relationship with New York’s public transportation, but on this trip I appreciated the subway’s ungainly beauty, connecting this vast and diverse metropolis.
In my week trailing the mayoral candidates, I was reminded of how difficult an endeavor it is to run for office. It takes a special kind of person and energy to run, and more important, to lead, especially in New York. But as much as we ask of our leaders, we must also participate more in our democracy. During the last New York mayoral primaries, in 2021, only 26.5 percent of registered eligible voters cast ballots.
Still, for the public, there are times when politics may seem overwhelming. On a campaign stop in the Sunnyside Greenmarket, the candidate Brad Lander tried to offer a flier and a pitch to a man who looked to be in his 40s. But the man just stared straight ahead, without breaking stride, and groaned, “Oh God, not another Democrat, please,” and walked away. Mr. Lander looked at me with an eye roll, as though to say, “You see what I have to deal with?”
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Damon Winter is a Times photographer working for the Opinion section, based in Miami.
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