ARTIST STATEMENT – 1980s Downtown NYC

In the early 1980s I attended a punk performance at CBGB’s, a gritty music venue that used to be located on the Bowery in NYC. The band, the audience, the sense of danger and rebellion that permeated the club was electrifying. I was captivated it’s ethos of abandon and chaos. I felt an immediate urge to record its gritty magnetism. It was the first step inside a photographic journey that would eventually launch a lifetime career.

I started photographing “the scene” at a few clubs in the East Village & the Lower East Side. Gradually, I became a regular contributor and intermittent photo editor for the East Village Eye, a tabloid-sized independent publication launched by Leonard Abrams and sustained for 9 years through the creative efforts of a motley crew of writers and photographers.

It would be thirty years before I cracked open that archive of 1980s photographs. The images capture a raucous, chaotic, unique period in downtown NYC that existed for only a decade. Real estate speculation, gentrification, AIDS-related deaths and a confluence of other factors eventually tore apart the edgy amalgam of downtown culture until most vestiges of what fueled that artistic zeitgeist disintegrated. 

Many of these images have never been published or seen by the public. My desire in presenting them now is to pay homage to the electric personalities (and places) that floundered or flourished during that period of New York City history. This body of work forever preserves their legacy; so that their fruitful contributions to NYC will not be forgotten.