‘Muslim Taxi Driver Praying in the Evening in a Street of West Village’: A Stock Image and Its Implications

This article takes as its point of departure a 2009 stock photograph of a scene on New York City’s West 15th Street, where a taxi driver is observed performing the Islamic ritual of evening prayer. The focus shifts from the practice that transforms the city street into a place of prayer to the data that lurk beneath the surfaces of the digital image, connecting the explicit architecture of religious observance to the implicit networks of time, space, and technology that shape it, and registering the real impact of digital coordinates upon physical space. This approach compares the technologies that inform the orientation of prayer with those devoted to mobile advertising, observed at a moment when the implications of digital tools are becoming newly visible on the streets of New York. It examines the databases that track the movement of the driver, traces the international telecommunications networks that fuel the commercial exploitation of the city’s real estate, sets the geographies of religious observance against those of immigration and surveillance, and concludes by juxtaposing the more ambiguous devotions of the stereotypical contemporary city.