Small Camera, Big Apple: Ricoh Opens a GR Space in New York

Ricoh tried out New York before it signed the lease.

In late October, the company took over 21 Spring Street in SoHo for a free, four-day GR 30th Anniversary Pop-Up. Thirteen live sessions, three guided street photography walks, ambassador talks, shooting stations and a closing party.  

The night before it opened, Max Del Prior led a “30 Years of GR” photo walk out of the B&H SuperStore.

A week after the pop-up wrapped, on October 29, Ricoh made it official. GR Space New York City opens in winter 2027, the first one in the United States.

Ricoh is building a whole space around one pocket camera.

What’s Coming

GR Space NYC will be a showroom, a classroom, a gallery and a community hub, with retail for the current lineup: the GR IV, GR IV HDF and GR IV Monochrome. You can handle the cameras, take classes, catch community events. They will have a rotating exhibition to see.

Ricoh still has plenty to reveal. The address, the opening date, the first exhibition and the class schedule are all due in the coming months.

Ken Curry, president of Ricoh Imaging Americas, tied the city and the camera together.  In his words, “Both are driven by observation, spontaneity and finding extraordinary moments in everyday life.”

A Store for One Camera

Leica runs roughly 120 stores and 30 galleries worldwide, and sells everything from lenses to watches.  Sony’s Alpha stores push a whole system. Ricoh is building a space for a single fixed-lens compact with a 28mm lens.

 Ricoh decided one camera line pulls enough people together to fill a room in Manhattan.

New York joins six GR Spaces: Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Brisbane and Seoul. The Tokyo original opened in Harajuku in August 2024.  It has a photobook cafe stocked by a Kichijoji photobook shop, a round gallery wall, a touch-and-try bar and a GR repair counter.

We can expect a serious gallery, too. GR Space Tokyo has hosted “Daido Moriyama: In Tokyo,” about 60 pictures shot on GR cameras. Brisbane opened with a show called “IV,” four Australian photographers working only with the GR IV.

From Moriyama to SoHo

The GR story starts in 1996 with the GR1, a film compact with a 28mm f/2.8 lens. Daido Moriyama carried one, and his gritty, high-contrast Tokyo street work, which made the little camera legendary.

Now that lineage lands in the city of Garry Winogrand and Vivian Maier. New York street photography has always been a thing. A GR clubhouse there feels like a homecoming.

Why the GR gets a Space

The GR is the anti-spec camera. It skips the viewfinder hump, the lens mount and the retro dials. You get one small body, a 28mm lens and a fast shutter button.

Snap Focus is the secret weapon. You preset a distance, say 2.5 meters, and a full press fires instantly at that distance, skipping autofocus entirely. It’s zone focusing, the old street photographer’s trick, built right in.

The current GR IV keeps the formula and sharpens it. It weighs 262 grams, wakes up in about 0.6 seconds and carries 53GB of built-in memory, enough for roughly 3,500 full-size JPEGs before you ever need a card. In a year of memory card sticker shock, that’s a good bonus.

It’s discreet, too. People see a small black box and keep living their lives, and that’s where the good pictures can come from.

And it sells. The GR line has sold out faster than Ricoh can restock it for almost two years running. Ricoh’s CFO credited the GR series for the camera business’s higher sales and profit.  

Compact camera shipments as a whole jumped 30% in 2025, per CIPA.

Will It Work?

A physical camera space in 2027, for a camera that sells out online anyway, sounds like a gamble.  The camera sells itself. Ricoh is building a home and experience for the people who already love it and for the curious to try it out.

Leica proved the model with its galleries and Akademie workshops, and Ricoh has now run it in six cities. The real question is reach. Tokyo has decades of GR culture behind it. New York has its own camera culture, and the SoHo pop-up looked like a solid start for Ricoh.

30 Years of GR

• 1996, GR1: the film compact with a 28mm f/2.8 lens that started it all
• 2001, GR21: a 21mm ultra-wide film sibling
• 2005, GR Digital: the first digital GR
• 2013, GR: an APS-C sensor in a pocket body, the big leap
• 2019, GR III: 24MP and in-body stabilization
• 2021, GR IIIx: the 40mm-equivalent sibling
• 2025, GR IV: 25.74MP APS-C and 53GB of built-in memory
• 2026, GR IV Monochrome and a 6,000-unit 30th Anniversary Edition, with the GR IVx (40mm equivalent) in development

What NYC Enthusiasts Should Do

• Watch Ricoh’s channels for the address, opening date and first exhibition, which should be due in the coming months.
• Want the 40mm view? The GR IVx is slated for winter 2026 or later. The GR IIIx is discontinued, so the used market is where to look for that one.
• Why not bring your current GR to the opening? These spaces are about community, and the best tip you get all year might come from a fellow shooter.

Forever a Snapshooter

Ricoh put “Forever a Snapshooter” on the shutdown screen of the 30th Anniversary Edition GR IV. That works.

Thirty years after a film pocket camera won over Daido Moriyama, the GR gets a home on the streets of NYC – a place known for street photography.

Sources

• Digital Camera World: Ricoh is building a dedicated space in NYC just for its viral compact camera
• Ricoh Imaging: GR SPACE TOKYO (official page)
• Time Out Tokyo: Daido Moriyama: In Tokyo
• PetaPixel: Ricoh GR Celebrates 30 Years, Forever a Snapshooter
• PetaPixel: Ricoh is Developing the GR IVx
• Imaging Resource: Ricoh GR IV 30th Anniversary Edition Kit