Not every story is comfortable. Some are just true.

Every city maintains a careful fiction about itself, a version of events that appears in tourism campaigns and architecture renderings and the parts of town where the light falls cleanly. Tapia is not interested in that version. He has spent his life in New York, born to immigrant parents who came here for the same reason everyone comes here, and he has seen both sides of what the city promises and what it delivers. On the Margins is the record of that knowledge.

This is the collection that earns the word manic. A man and his dog sheltering in a doorway on a January morning, surrounded by everything they own. A man in a good coat crouched against a Shoreditch wall, smoking alone like the city forgot he was there. The Pride parade at its most raw and ecstatic, caught not from a safe distance but from inside the feeling itself.

Tapia does not approach these images with pity, and he does not approach them with detachment. He approaches them with a film camera and the understanding that to photograph something honestly is to insist on its dignityto say that this moment, however uncomfortable, deserves to be preserved. These are not the photographs that make you feel good. They are the photographs that make you feel something. And for Tapia, that has always been the point.