Pablo Esteban is a New York street documentary photographer who specializes in capturing the city’s architecture as it is lived and experienced. His Academy of Art University Master of Arts in Photography thesis project "Urban Layers: The Architectural Identity of New York City" examines how buildings of various ages visually relate to one another — not as standalone monuments, but as part of the urban fabric of daily life.

A honors graduate of Alfred University with a BA degree in Communications, Estaban brings a highly personal dimension to his documentary filmmaking. His great-grandparents had immigrated to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx in 1905 as Italian immigrants, and he had grown up in an 1855 Greek Revival brownstone for his first 22 years. This multigenerational century-long connection to New York architecture informs the way that he looks at and records the city and the way in which buildings hold hidden family histories and collective cultural memory.

His work is a fusion of street documentation and architectural documentation to produce what he refers to as "contextual architectural photography." Drawn from Henri Cartier-Bresson's theory of decisive moment and Vivian Maier's contextual approach, he photographs buildings within everyday life — pedestrians walking past, traffic moving through, light changing, weather shifting. Architecture, for him, is not something you see; it is something you experience.

He asks questions that feel both universal and intensely personal: How do cities balance their reverence for the past with building their future? How do buildings become witnesses to urban transformation? They are questions informed by his own family's century-long relationship with New York's ever-changing world — questions he explores in each picture.