Jul 22, 2026
The Beauty Of Winning
The Beauty Of Winning
The Beauty Of Winning
New York City is the city that never ever sleeps. When the Knicks clinched their first championship in 53 years, the streets became something else entirely, a living, breathing extension of the game itself, where strangers who had never met moved through the city like they had always known each other. The energy was palpable everywhere, an interplay of intensity and joy that filled every block, every bar, every corner of Manhattan with something rare and electric. This was New York at its most unguarded, and it was exactly the kind that demands to be documented.
That is exactly what photographer Piers Greenan set out to do. Vice commissioned him to capture the fan experience around the championship run after seeing his work for i-D at Madison Square Garden. He was not a sports photographer by nature, but he had always been a New York photographer. Game by game, he explored Manhattan on foot and by bike with a loose plan and no intention of asking anyone to stop. For him, the ask disrupts the energy, and the energy is everything. The strongest photographs never came from the places he planned to be. They came from the corners he stumbled into, from the moments that unfolded before anyone noticed he was there.
It is a genuine connection to the city, one that captures the feeling of community not as something performed but as something felt. The kind that only surfaces when a place and its people are given a reason to fully show up for each other, and in that moment, New York did exactly that.
What emerged was not a record of a basketball season. It was a portrait of New York at its most open, strangers embracing, people crying in the streets, the unpredictable chaos that defines this city giving way to something profound and shared. He has always believed that the havoc is where the beauty lives. The Knicks gave him an entire city that believed the same thing, all at once, for the first time in a generation.
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Jul 22, 2026
The Beauty Of Winning
New York City is the city that never ever sleeps. When the Knicks clinched their first championship in 53 years, the streets became something else entirely, a living, breathing extension of the game itself, where strangers who had never met moved through the city like they had always known each other. The energy was palpable everywhere, an interplay of intensity and joy that filled every block, every bar, every corner of Manhattan with something rare and electric. This was New York at its most unguarded, and it was exactly the kind that demands to be documented.
That is exactly what photographer Piers Greenan set out to do. Vice commissioned him to capture the fan experience around the championship run after seeing his work for i-D at Madison Square Garden. He was not a sports photographer by nature, but he had always been a New York photographer. Game by game, he explored Manhattan on foot and by bike with a loose plan and no intention of asking anyone to stop. For him, the ask disrupts the energy, and the energy is everything. The strongest photographs never came from the places he planned to be. They came from the corners he stumbled into, from the moments that unfolded before anyone noticed he was there.
It is a genuine connection to the city, one that captures the feeling of community not as something performed but as something felt. The kind that only surfaces when a place and its people are given a reason to fully show up for each other, and in that moment, New York did exactly that.
What emerged was not a record of a basketball season. It was a portrait of New York at its most open, strangers embracing, people crying in the streets, the unpredictable chaos that defines this city giving way to something profound and shared. He has always believed that the havoc is where the beauty lives. The Knicks gave him an entire city that believed the same thing, all at once, for the first time in a generation.