New York City in the 1980s
The following is the text of an article with many more photos that appears in the journal Roamings.
New York in the 1980s was enthralling and sobering at the same time. It was tough, uncompromising, dirty, dangerous and astonishingly creative. All the major media outlets were based in the city and all the world's people were represented on a typical, graffiti covered subway train. There were protests, demonstrations and ethnic parades (which I have posted on other web journals) as well as more common interactions with every possible attitude and activity.
Times Square, filled to the brim with sex shops and edgy, menacing or homeless youths as well as drug sellers, was nothing like today's thoroughly tourist and television oriented district. Central Park's Great Lawn had deteriorated into dusty dismay yet it was regularly capable of drawing immense crowds for outdoor concerts of a size held nowhere else in America. Steps away from the rich inhabitants of the Upper East Side was the poverty and crime of Harlem and East Harlem. A short distance from Wall Street were the crowds and markets of Chinatown and the heated conflicts of Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side next to the subversive energy of the East Village.
It was a time when Ronald Reagan was president and Ed Koch was mayor. Everyone wore tight pants or short cut-off jeans (styles in effect since the mid-1970s) and sneakers with long, white socks topped by stripes. In the early half of the decade, one could sit at a desk inside an office and smoke a cigarette while talking with others who did the same thing.
The West Side had an elevated highway running from midtown to downtown. SoHo was evolving away from its manufacturing roots. The Sony Walkman was the cool technology that allowed one to carry a small, portable cassette tape player and listen to music anywhere through headphones, but teenagers still blasted their neighbors and subway riders with giant, heavy boom boxes. Personal computers had not yet made an appearance in homes and had barely penetrated offices. Phones were not even close to being portable. And baby boomers were entering a period of having their own babies.
One had to be careful and on alert at all times, yet there seemed to be more for the mind and soul in the five boroughs than any one city could possibly hold. I owned a small car and I rode my bicycle often to all five boroughs over the bridges and down the streets as far as the ocean, but I also walked all the time throughout the city. And I always had a camera with me.
It was in this challenging place, with its sheer quantity of subject matter, where I photographed more than ever before. I shot mostly black and white film (desired by the publishers with whom I worked), developed countless rolls of film and printed hundreds to thousands of 8 x 10 glossy photos. My clients were major textbook publishers, newspapers, politicians and government institutions. Along the way, I took pictures on location and in my studio of friends, neighbors, musicians, actors, office workers, youths, the elderly and strangers. But I also photographed as much as I could of the city's occupants and their everyday moments whether or not I had a specific assignment or client in mind.
An entry in my journal Roamings displays more than two dozen images from those years. But they only hint at what I saw as part of New York City in the 1980s.
Marc