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.
