The Logistics of a Citywide Project

The text came in at 4:41 on a Friday: OK so Saturday, I think is going to work for me. I'm just waiting on ONE email to confirm I don't have an event.

This is how you make a book when you have a day job. You wait on one email. You check if Saturday works. You hope the cat shows up.

Gulce Kilkis is the photographer behind Bodega Cats of New York. She shoots client work during the week. I sell websites for a tech company. We get weekends. Sometimes just Sundays. Sometimes not even that.

The book needs 53 to 65 cats across all five boroughs. We started shooting in October. Manuscript due in January. A good day, we hit six locations. A great day, eight. But a great day requires the owners to be there, the cats to be awake, and the light to cooperate. Some days we get two.

What She Sees

Gulce grew up in Istanbul, where street cats are everywhere. She did not photograph them then. They were just there, like pigeons, like traffic. She started shooting animals in 2023, after she had been away long enough to see them differently. At a bodega in Bushwick, we met an owner named Omar who has eight cats. He heard Gulce say three words and guessed she was Turkish. Not just Turkish. He guessed she came to the U.S. at 25. He was right. He said he could place any accent from any of 194 countries. Then he showed us photos of Juicy, his first cat, now 18 years old and retired to his apartment. I never loved anybody more than Juicy in my life, he said.

That is what Gulce gets that I do not. The owners see her and something opens up.

The Spreadsheet

I keep a spreadsheet color-coded by borough. Red means we still need to shoot. Green means done. In early December, there was a lot of red.

Gulce texted: ok, yeah we can do more days the second half of December to get as many cats in

Then: Yeah we'll need to do a mad dash lol we'll get it done we're in good shape

The Bronx requires a full day. The stores are spread out. You cannot subway-hop the way you can in Brooklyn. We planned to start at 9 AM, drive from Astoria, and work south until we lost the light.

The morning of, it snowed. I texted asking if she still wanted to go. She did. The roads were bad. The owners were surprised anyone showed up. We got seven cats.

The Cats Who Hide

There is a bodega in Lower Manhattan we have tried three times. Every visit, the cat is somewhere else. Behind the freezer. In the basement. The owner shrugs. Another store has eight cats and we still need the release signed. One of these days keeps sliding because there are only so many days.

The manuscript deadline does not slide. The cats do not know this.

The spreadsheet is almost green.

Bodega Cats of New York comes out this fall.