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I ♥ New York —
Street Photography —
Subway Photography —
NYC Portraits — Recommended titles
by David Isay, Stacy Abramson, Harvey Wang (Photo) Random House, 2000. 176pp. book dimensions: 8 x 8 inches.
"From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, nearly 100,000 men found shelter each night in places with names like the Dandy, the Niagara, the Palace, and the Grand Windsor Hotel. These lodging houses, located in the infamous skid row known as the Bowery, are almost gone now, but those that remain provide a fascinating view of old New York and a vanishing era. Isay, an award-winning radio documentary producer, and Wang, a professional photographer, have captured this world in Flophouse. To present the story of this neglected population, the authors interviewed a number of residents in each of four remaining "flops." Each short narrative is told in the resident's own words and is accompanied by one or two full-page photographs. These are stories of immigrants, drug addicts, and men who are just down on their luck. There's John, who gets up every night at three in the morning to bleach his floor; Jack, who's been shooting dice for over 50 years; and Ted, the intellectual dishwasher, who set out to be nothing and succeeded." --Deborah Bigelow for Library Journal
by David Isay, Stacy Abramson Sound Portraits, 1999. Audio CD
"This is an audio portrait of one of the final vestiges of the Bowery, New York's notorious skid row. In the first half of the century, the mile-long Bowery's bars, missions and cheap hotels (or flophouses) were home to an estimated 35,000 down-and-out men each night. Today, only a handful of flophouses, virtually unchanged for half a century, are all that remain of this once teeming world. For several months in 1998, David Isay and Stacy Abramson had unprecedented 24-hour access to the Sunshine Hotel, one of the last of the no-frills establishments." --description
by Gillian Zoe Segal W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 128pp. book dimensions: 8.5 x 6.2 inches, 66 b/w photos
"Plenty of books feature New York City's famous landmarks, but what about the Big Apple's famous or notorious, or merely interesting citizens? Former mayor Ed Koch, Carlyle Hotel crooner Bobby Short, bearded lady Jennifer Miller, Chinatown's Egg Cake Lady and The Oldest Cabbie are just a few of the folks Gillian Zoe Segal highlights in her book of photographs and biographical sketches, New York Characters. It's not a comprehensive gathering ("Woody Allen dissed me and I got in a fight with the "Soup Nazi," she writes), but that's part of its charm: after all; a unique city deserves a quirky cross-section." --Publishers Weekly
by Bruce Davidson St. Ann's Press. 2003, 172pp., 147 tritone images.
"For two years in the 1960s, Bruce Davidson photographed one block in East Harlem. He went back day after day, standing on sidewalks, knocking on doors, asking permission to photograph a face, a child, a room, a family. Through his skill, his extraordinary vision, and his deep respect for his subjects, Davidson's portrait of the people of East 100th Street is a powerful statement of the dignity and humanity that is in all people. Long out of print, this volume is a reissue of the classic book of photographs originally published in 1970 and recently included in The Book of 101 Books. This reprint includes over 20 new images not included in the original edition. Davidson's strobe doesn't dispel the gloom or glamorize the ruin of the apartments, alleyways, storefronts, and rubble-strewn lots where people stopped to pose for him, but the rapport he established allows those people to surrender to the camera with their humanity intact." --Vince Aletti
by Salvo Galano powerHouse Books, 2001. 112pp. book dimensions: 13.6 x 10.2 inches
"For five years, photographer Salvo Galano visited a park near the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in New York. There, tens of thousands of homeless men, women, and children have gathered daily for food, friendship, and guidance since its inception in 1982. Galano set up a makeshift studio with a simple burlap backdrop and photographed the fascinating characters he encountered, documenting their stories of love, loss, and survival. Sidewalk Stories, Galano's moving testimony to the power of the human spirit, showcases some of New York City's most remarkable individuals - the homeless - and their integrity and courage despite the stigma of homelessness. Accompanied by mind-boggling, up-to-the-minute statistics on this dire situation, Sidewalk Stories illustrates that homelessness could happen to any of us: Naval Academy cadets, policemen, performers, inventors, grandmothers, families, the disabled...But as Galano writes, "Homeless does not necessarily mean hopeless." Proceeds from the sales of Sidewalk Stories will be donated to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen." --book description
by Margaret Morton Yale University Press, 1995. 148pp. book dimensions: 9.5 x 9.5 inches
"Morton's four-year photographic journey takes place in a structure that was created by Robert Moses in 1934 in order to hide the Hudson River Railroad from the expensive apartments on Riverside Drive. When the rail line was closed down in the 1970s, this concrete tunnel stretching from 72nd Street to 125th Street along the Hudson River became a shelter for a large community of homeless people who are now being forced out as a result of neighborhood pressure. Using both text and 60 duotone photographs, Morton offers a sympathetic, multidimensional and powerfully humane portrait of this invisible neighborhood. ..." --Publishers Weekly
by Margaret Morton Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 160pp. book dimensions: 10 x 10 inches, 74 b/w photos.
"Glass House, which documents a squatters' community on New York's Lower East Side, is Margaret Morton's fourth book about the makeshift homes built by the city's homeless population. Since 1989, Morton has honed her skills photographing, interviewing, and presenting the compelling stories of people living on the margins of society. Her commitment and passionate advocacy justifies comparison with Jacob Riis, the great nineteenth-century photographer and social reformer." –-Bonnie Yochelson some photos from his book can be viewed here.
by Thomas Roma, Norman Mailer, Robert Coles powerHouse Books, 2001. 179pp.
"Camping out in the Brooklyn Criminal Court building from December 1997 to early 1999, Roma (Come Sunday), photographer and director of photography for Columbia University, talked to victims, defendants, trial witnesses and their families, and sometimes took their portraits then and there. The result is this collection of 83 duotones that give human faces to the application of the law. As Norman Mailer writes in a short foreword, "justice comes to long dead hours sitting around," as the beleaguered visages and tired bodies here readily attest. As Robert Coles, Harvard social ethicist and presidential Medal of Freedom winner, puts it in an introduction, these photos show "the struggle of various Americans to find themselves, to get a grip on their emotional moorings, to steer clear of all sorts of perplexing and scary legal imperatives as they descend upon one's eyes, ears, thoughts, anticipations, expectations, amidst a series of events that have their own momentum, logic, prompt their own requirements, madness, obligations." That sentence's complexities perfectly reflect those of the photographs." --Publishers Weekly some photos from his book can be viewed here.
by Thomas Roma, Giancarlo T. Roma powerHouse Books, 2001. 179pp.
" The idea to collaborate on Show & Tell with his son Giancarlo came to famed photographer Thomas Roma after he read his son’s second grade journal and a homemade book he’d written called How to Train Your Dog. Taken with how well Giancarlo expressed himself and how clear he was about his feelings, Roma asked his son if he would be interested in collaborating on a book. Giancarlo agreed, and after discussing several possibilities, they decided that Giancarlo would write about dad’s Brooklyn photographs—from his earliest days as a photographer in 1973 through today. They began with a box of fifty photographs, and edited according to Giancarlo’s preferences, turning the process of creating the book into a dialog between father and son, photographer and writer." --book description some photos from his book can be viewed here.
by Greg Friedler W. W. Norton & Co, 1997. 160pp. book dimensions: paperback, 7.3 x 9.5 inches.
"In this unique and startling collection of photographic diptychs, we see average New Yorkers first clothed, then completely naked. Only their ages and professions are given as captions. Here we see all types of people, men and women of all shapes, ages, colors, and classes. ... On a basic level, we're all the same, human and vulnerable. Unlike traditional nude photography, these lack any overtly erotic or sexual quality; they are simply real people who reveal both their public (clothed) selves and their private (naked) selves. Friedler's approach is akin to the anthropologist. His work as a documentary photographer is an investigation into humanity, a survey and study of people. If clothing is a voluntary choice, unclothed we see people in an involuntary state--we see their bodies as we see their faces, unmasked. At once deeply intimate and surprisingly matter of fact, these images reveal more of our commonality than our differences." --book description
by Jim Flynn Curbside Press, 2003. 305pp. book dimensions: paperback, 7.0 x 4.5 inches
"Collection of 20 biographies of homeless people living on the streets of New York City. Contains 89 photographs and 16 drawings by homeless artists." --book description [note: this is NOT a photography book.] some photos from his book can be viewed here.
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