Original subtitles

[ELECTRIC GUITARS PLAYING SOFTLY]

Downloaded from YTS.MX

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SINGER: I wonder why that is.

The paper boy don't come no more.

JOES MEYEROWITZ [VOICEOVER]: Why do

some photographers go to the street,

and other photographers go to a studio?

Some people want to pretend it's a movie,

and other photographers walk into the world and they say,

show me.

Those select few, through time, who are willing to go out

into chaos with some high hopes of interacting

with a moment where life will become clarified for them.

They can welcome ambiguity and surreal

aspects of this kind of chaos.

Even though it's chaos, they will

have a moment of clarification.

[vibraphone playing]

JOEL MEYEROWITZ: I was an art director

and Robert Frank shot this job for me,

and it was so interesting, I had never seen

a real photographer before.

He just was so physical and he moved so agilely,

and he was balletic, and and he kind of whispered to the girls

as he was photographing them.

And I left that shoot two hours later

and I went out on the street and suddenly everything

on the street was alive to me.

Someone waiting for a taxi, two people hugging goodbye,

and I started saying, click, click, click, in my mind.

And by the time I got back to my office I knew I had to leave.

I walked into my office, art director

said, how did the shoot go?

And I said, it was great, I'm quitting.

And he said, why what are you going to do?

I said, I want to be a photographer.

And I remember he asked me the crucial question he said,

do you have a camera?

I said, no I don't have a camera.

He said, how are you going to make pictures

if you don't have a camera?

And he opened his drawer, and he handed me his camera, Pentax,

and he said, here, use this until you get a camera.

So that for me was the beginning.

I wandered the streets not knowing what I was shooting.

I just knew I had to be out there watching life

because I was interested in the way people did things.

It seemed to me that's what you photographed,

the instantaneous gesture when somebody

made some kind of a motion, or did something physical.

I think that part of what you love when you're

a street photographer is this kind of sensibility that

develops where you think you understand something about, not

only the person you're photographing,

or the group you're photographing,

but the culture at large.

Responding to things, and at the same time

you're learning what they mean to you.

What does a gesture signify?

What does a certain kind of person make you feel like?

You learn to deepen your way of reading these signs.

It's the joy of the exchange.

Only I can identify with them in this way.

So it's a way of learning to read

your culture, which is, I think, a great fascination

for photographers.

[camera snaps]

[camera snaps]

[camera snaps]

[camera snaps]

[techno music plays]

BOOGIE: I carry my camera with me, at least one

camera with me, at all times.

You really never know when something's going to happen.

It's like a Samurai.

But, you don't have time to think, you just react.

I was born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia.

It was amazing, you know, because we grew

up in a perfectly safe society.

Then all of a sudden, it just became terrible.

All of a sudden we had war going on all around,

people were coming back from the front lines half insane,

a lot of weapons, crime was on the rise.

I think I started to take pictures

of in the midst of the insanity, of the chaos and sanctions.

Basically I tried to preserve my sanity, you know,

because when you're behind the camera

you're not a participant, you're just an observer.

In 2003 I started shooting these junkies and gangsters

in Bushwick, Bed-stuy.

What can they do to me?

They can kill me, so what?

Yeah.

I remember a couple of times I was

in with some scary situations, and my hands would shake

when I would change the roll.

My hands were shaking, literally.

But then when I would start shooting, no,

still, like a wolf, they can't sense any fear.

And you can't fake that.

It's like, OK, she's sitting on a toilet, shooting up,

and I'm standing on a bathtub taking pictures, and I'm fine.

It's like, cold, no feeling.

For me it's becoming what you're shooting.

We have to get into their heads.

My accent, I think, helps.

You know I don't sound like anyone they hate,

and then in a way we develop some kind of relationship.

Of course I was offered crack many times,

one guy was like, hey man, hey you want some crack?

Hey man, no, I have an addictive personality,

I don't want to do it.

But crack is not addictive.

I'm like, come on man, shut up, look at you.

He's like, yeah, you're right man.

Gang kids, they asked, hey Boogie,

would you like to take some pictures of us with guns?

And I just couldn't believe it was happening.

I'm like, yeah.

And then we are in the hallway of the projects,

loading guns, bang, bang.

And it wasn't just about taking pictures at that point,

it was just about being there.

You know this thing like, there are lines

that shouldn't be crossed.

What are those lines?

The deeper you go, the better pictures you'll take.

And it becomes like, the most important thing in your life.

And it can ultimately fuck you up, this trail.

I thought I would continue the project in some way,

but it was just so depressing.

I would go there and I couldn't recover for a week.

This chapter was closed, it was over.

After the book was done I gave it to some people over there.

They loved it.

I think they feel like they're leaving something behind.

Same thing with photographers, you

feel better knowing that, I don't know,

in many years you won't to be around,

but your book will still be in some bookstore.

And someone will look at it.

And you feel like you become immortal.

MAX KOZLOFF: People with cameras who

want to photograph New York, and do it kind of a justice

have a problem.

Here is a city where everything happens almost,

it seems, at once.

Noise, movement, combustions, energy, dissonance, danger.

New York photographers have to take all those matters

into account to do some kind of record that encompasses

a human setting, and a cluster of variables

that defy imagination.

So it was no wonder that a number of photographers

grew up taking advantage of this,

what I call, volatile proximity of citizens to each other.

It seems one will never catch up if one does this in New York.

And that's what advances the motivations

of everyone who tries it.

MARTHA COOPER: When I first moved to New York, which

was in 1975, I got a job with the New York Post,

and of course we were shooting film.

And I had two cameras and both cameras were loaded,

so I often had a lot of film left over.

It just became my habit, at the end of the day,

to cruise through alphabet city on my way back to the post.

The Lower East Side at the time was

a complete, like, bombed out, war-zone.

Vast empty areas and vacant lots.

What I learned when I was studying anthropology

was definitely the point of view I had when I was taking

pictures in New York, which is sort

of an ethnographic point of view,

as opposed to trying to be an artist.

I'm not trying to do a kind of investigative reporting

where I'm showing the evils of landlords, for example.

I'm more about public space, and how people are using the space,

and how people are surviving, and how they're

using the raw materials that become available when all

these buildings are torn down to maybe build a little go-cart,

or build a little clubhouse.

And that was the sort of thing I was looking for.

Anything this ephemeral is like, wonderful subject

matter for a still photograph.

You know it's not going to be around for long,

and in just less than a second you can take a picture

and preserve it.

[funky organ playing]

One of the kids that had been flying pigeons

showed me his little book of drawings,

and that's how I got into graffiti.

There were a handful of people taking pictures of graffiti.

And if we hadn't been, well then, a lot of it

would have been lost.

[bass and drums playing]

It looks as if every car was covered

with this beautiful graffiti, but in fact

you could and stand for five hours and never even get one.

It was not easy to catch those trains.

I mean I would wake up before dawn, in the winter when it was

cold, and go up to the Bronx and stand in a vacant lot for hours

just waiting for the train to come by,

and sometimes nothing would come by,

and I used to get calls, Yo Martha,

we did a piece on the whatever.

MAN [ON RECORDING]: [inaudible] on the six line,

bright colors, last lot [inaudible] talking about,

Vice Boys, you know the crew.

MARTHA COOPER: For me it was always

a matter of getting the right background

with the right train.

I don't want to see 10 pictures of trains

with the same background.

So if you look at subway art, you

won't see the same background, because once I got a really

nice piece with a really nice background

I would go find another background,

stand in another vacant lot.

Bottom line is, you've captured something that actually might

be of interest in the future.

And it's not until things are gone that you realize that you

miss taking a picture of them.

JILL FREEDMAN: Hi guys.

How you doing?

Jesus.

Hard-ons aren't they?

Bunch of hard-ons.

CROWD: If you are a photographer

or you are videotaping you have the right

to do so within a reasonable distance of the police.

If the police ask you to move back,

move back as little as possible.

You're interested in photography?

I need to.

Well you know I have an exhibition

of photographs on now.

Really, where is it?

Madison Avenue between 65th and 66th.

Madison, 65th and 66th.

The show is called street cops.

It's from a book I did that came out

in '81, nice precinct in Midtown South, 30 years ago

when there were real cops.

[electric guitar plays]

I have never seen a book about good cops.

I have seen books about the bums, the crooks, the creeps.

I've always seen all the bad behavior.

I have never seen a book about a good cop,

and certainly not photographs, and certainly not

showing what is the job.

Simply, what does it mean to be a cop in New York City?

Well in the beginning I would do a couple double tours, go

on a four to 12, do that or maybe I'd

go a little into midnight, and still

manage to miss the one time they had a delivery of a baby.

Fell into the woman's pantyhose, that's

why I had to be in the first car,

if I got there a second later, I didn't get the shot.

When I was doing the job everybody didn't have a camera

and I worked on being invisible.

Although when I first started, they

got some bad guy, some malefactor,

and they were cuffing him and putting him in a car,

and he said, get that fucking bitch and a camera

away from me.

I thought, that's the least of your problems, pal.

If they don't do the crime, don't get your picture,

you know?

And shut the fuck up furthermore.

Yeah they were afraid of me, I'm a tough mother.

Fuckin' A they were afraid of me.

Those are the perpetrators who were cuffed,

and there's blood on the floor, a pack of Pall-Malls,

in the blood, and the [inaudible] I suppose,

is supposed to be [inaudible], leaned over, came over

to the table, you know because he

wanted to get in the picture.

And I was scared most of time, you know, well, violence.

I want you to-- boom!

That's it, you're gone.

We ran to a thing, the kid was shot

in the stomach with a shotgun.

The true color of violence, not red like ketchup,

gray like dead.

And the book was about that, this is

not a movie this is not the TV.

It's an honor to be able to make a good photograph of anyone,

and it's a great privilege.

It's the only tool that will stop time itself.

I majored in sociology and cultural anthropology,

and I thought all I wanted to do was get out into the world.

And I only realised that that's what

I was doing with the camera.

So by the firemen again, it was no question

that I'm going to run in like, and do a journalism thing.

I wrote in the book, they're like soldiers

and they will die for someone else

or someone else's property.

They're not like soldiers, they do not kill.

They bring life, not death.

And this is how I proceeded.

What I saw was men that really love each other.

And usually it's a pity that that only

happens in the front lines and in combat.

And I got to see the genuine affection and the love

and the working together and the lack of the stupid crap.

Gentleness, the gentle giant kind of thing, with the hand

on the head, how tender.

It is firstly a big man being gentle,

oh, it just always gets me.

They saved this whole family, that they thought the building

have been emptied, and one of my guys

heard the grandmother crying above the fire floor,

so I had to walk away on that one.

I was being touched all the time,

but I knew I'd die before anyone saw me cry.

That's how many we lost, 343.

Oh, wow, wow, oh wow.

[crying]

[ELECTRIC GUITAR AND DRUMS PLAYING]

JEFF MERMELSTEIN: So I moved to New York in 1978,

and I guess I brought with me a naivete, an unknowingness,

a freshness, of having grown up on a typical suburban block.

So I bring with me a different kind of a sponge.

I immediately fell in love with the energy and all

that it's made up of.

The density of the people, and who they are,

and what they're doing.

I like busy streets.

I like empty streets.

Sometimes I'll see something on the ground

and it has no people in it.

I'm always looking in storefronts

and bank windows and cafes, and I

like going into the whirlwind.

I like it all.

I really like it all.

One of the most exciting things in this kind of photography

is the ingredient of surprise, not only

surprise at what your encounter might be in the real world,

but what you get back on the film.

That's part of the reason why we're excited to get our film.

I don't care how many rolls I take of something.

To me that doesn't matter at all.

It's not like a contest.

Sometimes a picture will happen single,

but often it will not happen that way.

And clearly I have a memory of the burning shoe.

When I saw a burning shoe I couldn't-- I mean,

I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't have thought about it,

I couldn't have thought of it happening.

And I was like, how much film do I have?

So I had like three rolls that day,

and I have at least maybe, I don't know, seven frames.

You know they're going to vary, this has

a particular pedestrian, a particular amount of smoke,

and distance.

I really worked the shoe.

[organ and drums playing]

Some people think my pictures are funny.

I didn't realize that.

And it makes me excited.

It's hard to be funny.

I do whatever I can to help me take my next picture.

I just sniff something that way, I'll go that way.

And it's totally instinctual, and so like when I'm out there

I could just do whatever.

It's not really a casual thing, it's

pushing my intuition in such a way that might

relate to a jazz musician.

And I'm not musical at all, but it must relate somehow

to that process of creativity.

I know how much film or time it takes to make

a an interesting photograph.

There is a luck, but I believe it was Helen Levitt that said

that you create your luck, and there's a lot of work

involved in creating luck.

[bass and drums playing]

MAX KOZLOFF: Helen Levitt was a diminutive woman walking

with a small miniature camera, able to conceal

her activities because of her modest presence,

and agile movement.

The work she produced is figurative

in our imaginative memories of New York

because of both the warmth and the pathos of the sightings

she made of children, and immigrants, and poor people,

and communities, all hugger-mugger together

in a kind of exquisite concord.

Lisette Model, she had a Rolleiflex

where she'd have to look down into the viewfinder.

The result was many of her figures seem to loom enormously

and prodigiously on the horizon, above which,

there loomed these enormous skyscrapers.

She made these figures incredibly

monumental, impending, sinister sometimes,

morbid, and unforgettable.

The phenomenon of Diane Arbus, so memorable

in her understanding of photographic past in New York.

Very unique, unrepeatable, idiosyncratic in the extreme

in her idea that the banality of everyday existence was in fact

a possible source of horror and perversion.

Arbus upturned, pulled a rug from,

our notions that everything was getting

going along as it should.

There was a kind of subliminal freakishness

in many of the characters she photographed.

After Arbus, New York photography

would never remain the same.

Nobody really thought about style in photography

for much of the 19th century, and it's not

until the late 1880s really you get to Stieglitz and Emerson,

and various other people in Britain

as well as United States.

And this trickles down to art photography, all the magazines,

and soon you have dentists in [inaudible]

taking pictures of trees at sunset that look Japanese.

And then meanwhile all along there's

been this great documentary photography that

passed unnoticed it the time.

And there were a lot of these, sort of, citizen photographers.

Also I think of the photo league, that great institution,

some of whom made interesting pictures by accident,

and some of whom were, like, real artists.

REBECCA LEPKOFF: I saw an article in, I think it was PM,

about the Photo League and their workshop,

and there was a little photo on there.

And I said, the philosophy they have, this is what I'm doing

by myself, you know photographing the way

people lived, where they lived, how they lived,

what they were doing, how you see the way they lived.

It was having to do with humanity.

I went to visit them I ended up signing up

for one of these dance classes.

Dance must have help me, we used to study choreography.

Space had a lot to do with dance.

The space you're making and the space where

you're standing on the stage.

She just moved the space of the stage onto the street.

The camera is supposed to make a document of how things are,

how people looked maybe in 1950 with their Stetson hats

kerchiefs, or how their dresses looked,

or how the tenements looked.

I just kept, for years, taking photographs

of the Lower East Side.

During the glory of the Photo League

there's so many of the famous photographers

used to come down and spend time talking and meeting people.

I wonder if the Photo League didn't get

busted out, how they would be.

It was labeled un-American, and if the FBI was around

and they got a list, they could really grab you.

People really stopped coming because they were fearful.

It's just folded up.

You never talked about communism or anything,

but they were always kept an eye on us

because they felt we were close to the philosophy

of the working people, of the poor people.

MAN ON MEGAPHONE: Love it or leave it you fucking

communist piece of shit!

Relax!

MAN: What's that telling them?

They're saying that we're garbage and thats-- we are

citizens of the United States.

What are you going to do with these films that you're making?

CAMERAMAN: Oh I don't know.

Hopefully they'll be important some day, right?

Yeah you never know, you know?

CAMERAMAN: Hopefully you'll be important someday, right?

CLAYTON PATTERSON: It seemed like one

of the only places where I could fit in was New York.

And I'm from Western Canada which

is very provincial, very conservative, very sort of

like, backward in its own way.

I don't know whether you want to call it ego, or ambition,

or whatever, but yeah, I thought that this

was-- I wanted to swim in the biggest pool,

you know what I'm saying?

So I wanted to jump into the deep end,

so I ended up coming over here to the Lower East Side,

and Lower East Side was sort of like perfect.

I mean at that time it was like, dangerous and drugs,

but it had a class of people who I could easily identify with.

And so that made it really, sort of, comfortable to be around,

and also there was this whole kind of energy over here that

was really sort of wild and free and outlaw-ish and all of that.

And I found that to be very comfortable.

The one thing I did consistently in all the time,

in terms of the street, was photographing

people in front of my door.

By photographing in front of my door

and then putting the pictures in the window,

and making these people famous, I eventually

photographed the whole neighborhood, from 14th Street

to the Brooklyn Bridge, which is huge.

A lot of the people that are in the pictures

are the people that were on the streets,

a lot of the drug sellers, the gangs,

the bad guys, the good guys.

So a lot of times I would just do

little tricks like, instead of saying, cheese, I would say,

pussy.

And of course most guys will smile or laugh

when you say that, and then so you've

sort of captured them smiling.

And when you see them they just look

like good normal kids or people, they

just look like regular people.

It's not about you as an individual,

it's about you as a community.

So I think of my photography in multiple ways.

I think of it as keeping things for the future and sort

of preserving this moment now for them,

I think of it as an activist tool,

I think of it as something that can

give you access to places where you could never be before.

The Tompkins Square Park police ride,

that was August 6th or 7th, 1988, where a number of people

were there and had videos and photographs,

but they was sparse and few.

Whereas I ended up with a three hour and 33 minute tape which,

kind of, laid out the whole night.

It really created a major amount of press and noise,

so pretty soon I was on every TV station

including Oprah, and CNN, and New York Times, all of them.

OPRAH: Meet a man who went to jail,

rather than give police the videotape he made

of a demonstration turned riot.

It was a police riot.

CLAYTON PATTERSON: That was the first time

that the handheld video camera like that

had ever been used as a protest tool, and as an activist tool,

against government wrongdoing.

It was that egalitarian factor that you

didn't have to, you know, have gone to Harvard,

and learned art history, it wasn't really like that.

And I think at a certain level, too, I

think because of what I've photographed,

a lot of what I've done, some of it

appears to be anti-social because it was like,

conflicts with the police, stuff like that,

and I got cops in trouble for doing it,

but in reality it's not that it's anti-social,

it's interested in a social factor

that most people try to overlook.

And I think if one is going to spend their time doing

something, you ought to try to make it to be important,

you ought to make it significant.

And that's part of the reason of coming to New York.

Why did I come to New York?

Because I wanted to have what I did to become

relevant and significant.

[electric piano plays]

ELLIOTT ERWITT: I get the feeling that there are too

many bad pictures in the world.

But there's always room for a good ones,

because good ones illuminate, entertain, amuse, make people

feel, instruct, do all good things,

and give you some kind of an emotion, positive or negative,

or something.

It just can't lie flat, it has to speak to you in some way.

It has to make you laugh, or cry, or something in between.

And if it doesn't do that, then it's not very interesting.

A picture has to communicate, otherwise there's no point.

I've taken quite a few pictures already,

so sometimes you see the same thing that you've seen before,

and then you just don't do it.

And as I shoot film and not digital,

taking pictures is a process.

I mean, you take the picture, you gotta develop it,

you gotta make a contact, you gotta

make prints, and so forth.

I do everything in house.

My darkroom is downstairs.

I've always had a darkroom since I was 15 years old.

It's not like, with a digital camera where

you have an instant result. Digital manipulation

kills photography.

I think that's the unfortunate thing about digital.

It's made it too easy and everybody can get an image,

it's just that not everybody can get a good one.

There's not much optimism with my colleagues.

Things are tough.

Film certainly will become obsolete, the question is when?

The internet has not helped.

People want to use stuff for nothing.

Requirements are really quite base.

You don't really need photographers anymore,

for so many things you can just get stock

and make your own picture.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and you

get a picture.

JOEL MEYEROWITZ: Photography is a democratic medium,

anybody can use it.

But digital photography and the web

have made it truly the democratic,

worldwide, universal medium.

Everybody's a photographer now.

And we are going to find geniuses.

Geniuses are going to be awakened by this opportunity

to make pictures with their cell phone,

or their camera, because they're going to see the results of it

right away, and they're going to say, this fascinates me,

I can say something.

But the work they make is going to look

very much like what the digital world is, where we are today.

It's going to be very contemporary.

I mean sure, there's a lot of crap everywhere, we know that,

but I think there's also genius waiting to be discovered.

MARTHA COOPER: I used to think every time I pressed

the shutter it was $0.50.

And that click, click, click, that

could add up really quickly with the film and the developing.

But now it doesn't add up click, click,

click, so there's no reason not to just shoot everything.

BOOGIE: No, I don't own digital camera.

I shoot film only.

With film you keep pushing yourself,

and I think the result, because you don't know what you have,

you might get something better.

You might have some better results.

I don't have Photoshop and I don't really like computers.

I like email, I like Google, that's about it.

It's too precise.

I get very, very, very scared, so scared.

I could never buy enough external hard drives to back me

up, you see how I am.

I mean my whole house would have to be an external.

And then I'd have to get another house to back up the house.

It would never end.

I'm just crazy about my work, you

know you couldn't back it up.

I'm sure you could, but it's very hard for me.

JILL FREEDMAN: A picture's a picture.

What does it matter what tool you use?

I think it's a ludicrous and ridiculous

people carrying on about that.

It doesn't matter how you get the picture, it's the picture.

REBECCA LEPKOFF: Change is so inevitable.

What all these cameras out there photographing?

What don't they take?

Will there be anybody who's going

to be using the old photography the way it used to be,

as time goes on?

I just think about that.

[drums playing]

BRUCE DAVIDSON: I was 10 years old, and a friend of mine

came by, Sammy, Sammy Nichols.

And he said you want to see developing in my basement?

And I said, what's that?

He said, come along.

So I went with Sammy in this dark, dank, basement

with a ruby light, and he exposed something,

and an image appeared.

And that really affected me.

I ran home to my mother and said, can I have a darkroom?

I lived like a monk.

I had a mattress on the floor, a dying chiflera plant,

a darkroom-kitchen combination where

I could eat frozen Hershey bars and chicken while I printed.

All I wanted to do was take pictures.

I didn't care about anything else.

It's easy to penetrate someone's privacy.

And it's about privacy.

And I've tried in my work to make

contact, to offer pictures.

And even in a Brooklyn gang, I would give them pictures.

And it was a way of seeing them and a way of them seeing me.

And so I was able to be invisible, almost,

to them, because they were secure with me

being around with my camera.

But I would hand them a picture, not only picture of themselves,

but a picture of something else that I did, to let them

see there's an outside world.

And it was part of the bonding because they

were very depressed, and they were very angry.

They were very poor.

And there was nothing for them in that community.

I was angry too.

I had a possibility, I had a job, I had a life.

They didn't.

100th Street was considered the worst block in the city.

I'd worked on 100th Street in a large format 4x5 Linhof camera.

It was classic.

I was a real photographer because I

went under a black cloth, I fumbled around,

the pose is beautiful.

Dignity, it would bring a dignity

to the act of photography.

If I walked around in there with my little

Nikon or Cannon, or whatever, boom, boom, boom, boom,

it's too thin.

It's too thin because with 4x5, you

have to know what the picture is,

so that you become kind of collaborative

with your subject.

Time was suspended.

It wasn't a decisive moment, it wasn't a moment intention,

fluid, like the gang pictures.

It was different for me.

It was a different experience.

The subway in the late 70s, early 80s, was deplorable.

Everybody hated riding the subway, it's unsafe,

it never ran right, it's full of graffiti, all kinds of things,

dirty.

I read a lot of young boys' books on tiger hunts,

and I schedule the way I would be in a subway the same way

a tiger hunter would walk across a field.

It's always, attack from the rear.

So I was always aware that I might

be attacked from the rear on the subway, and actually I was.

I became addicted to the subway.

When I heard the rumble of the train below our bedroom window,

I jumped up like a werewolf.

Sometimes I'd go on the subway at one or two in the morning,

and stay until dawn.

I was starting to get a little crazy with it, you know?

Normally I had the camera out, because you can't approach

people and say, I'd like to take your picture,

and reach into your back pocket.

And if someone hesitated, I had an album

with me, a 5x7, a wedding album, gold trim,

with samples of my work in it.

It's a wedding between me and my subject.

Also the subway was sexy.

I had little love affairs for 10 seconds

with women on the train, and never see them again.

And it was Beauty and the Beast, but sometimes the beast

was beautiful.

That happens a lot with various bodies of work of mine,

where people are glad you're there to see them,

because no one's paying attention.

[electric guitar playing]

I don't expect everyone to be like me, thank God.

If you have 42 Bruce Gildens running around,

Jesus Christ, there'd probably be a ban against photography.

No one would be allowed to take street pictures

on the streets of New York.

I'm basically what's known as a street photographer.

And when I was growing up in Brooklyn,

in Williamsburg, I used to look out my second story

window at the vigorous street life down below,

and I was hooked.

And also television had a lot to do because I like film noir

and I like shadows.

At times someone will go out with me,

you know like I'm just with somebody, and they'll say,

hey there's a person for you, and I'll say no, they're

too-- I won't use the word, stylish,

but they're dressed too neatly.

They look like they are a character and they're not.

The hat is too neat, everything is too much

like they're programmed.

OK?

It's not like they are a character.

Just something catches me there's something striking

in them, and I don't mean a vulgarity type of striking,

I mean just as a detail.

It's something that just works.

They're a little bit more extreme or some of these people

I've made more extreme.

You know they're just average people,

but there's something I see in them

that attracts me, that makes me want to photograph them.

I realized I had to really jump in people's faces

to isolate them, to separate the foreground from the background.

Flash helps me visualize my feelings of the city

because it shows the stress, the energy, the speed,

and the anxiety of the people.

You can't photograph everybody, you can't photograph

every situation, because otherwise I wouldn't

be sitting here talking to you.

I feel almost like I'm a director out there.

I am the director, and sometimes if I

see something and the person turns the other way,

I say to myself, shit he doesn't take direction well.

[funky organ playing]

You know this thing about invisibility,

I mean, I think people overdo it.

When you have a little camera you become a sneak.

So it becomes a different-- the rules change, of the game.

OK?

You can be invisible and be very close, because sometimes I

work so close that people don't realize

I'm taking their picture.

They look behind them to see like,

who'd they take a picture of?

What happened with this picture was,

I was taking the picture because I like-- she's wearing

a bra and panties on the beach.

And then someone came over and said

what is he taking a picture of?

And she went, over there.

Here, this is quite interesting for me because I saw that

and I wanted to take a picture of his face,

because part of his jaw is like, missing.

OK?

So I went over and had a conversation with him,

and I asked him, I said, can I take a picture

up close of your face?

He said, yeah sure.

With his beautiful flowing hair, I

wish I had his hair, not his chin,

but the thing is, with his hair, I mean he's

like a beautiful bird for me.

So I don't-- people in my pictures aren't these people.

People in my pictures are symbols for what I see.

And it's how I express what the world is.

I don't think the world is an excellent place.

I'm comfortable doing what I do because I don't

think I'm doing anything wrong.

You know I don't let people bully me or intimidate me, OK?

So I'm not some pushover out there.

And if you look in my eyes, you'll see that I'm

not a normal guy sometimes.

I've done some pretty wild things out there.

[ELECTRIC GUITAR AND DRUMS PLAYING]

MAX KOZLOFF: When you speak of William Klein,

you speak of a bad boy, a kind of renegade

in the history of photographic practices.

When he came to New York in the 1950s

it was as if he had a score to settle.

So that there's a strange dissonant mixture

of familiarity and distancing that

goes on in William Klein's view of New York that epitomized

both the bitterness of his recognitions in the city,

and at the same time his affection for them.

Robert Frank produced for us an album

of the city, the exact opposite of the cheerful, gregarious

multitudes, for which the city has been celebrated

in many other photo campaigns.

His New York, on the contrary, was

a patchwork of sub-cultures and wary glances.

All of this comes through works of great power

that add to the mythos of the city

as a place you have to watch your step in.

JEFF MERMELSTEIN: People see me aiming at a certain direction,

they might think I'm taking their picture,

and if they're not liking that, they're not going to like that.

And it can and has been a problem more than once.

JILL FREEDMAN: Certain range finders

are magnificent weapons.

There's no mirror to get bounced around,

and if you wrap the strap tightly and go like that,

sideways, they don't mess with you too much.

I have to start exercising because I, I don't know,

I want to feel able to defend myself.

MARTHA COOPER: I don't go out with a lot of equipment,

but I don't hide the equipment either.

I go out with a worn old camera bag,

and I just try to be street savvy, that's all.

I got locked in the train once with some graffiti kids.

There are very special keys, and they locked me in,

so nobody could get at us, and then they

scribbled all over the place.

So they were little kids from Yonkers, white kids.

[men arguing]

They kept on trying to push me off the block

and I don't want to hear about it,

so eventually it got into a confrontation,

and then I got beaten up by the cops.

And I was covered in blood, my shirt was ripped,

I got a couple of teeth knocked out.

There was a guy that's-- you know, I don't know, I was--

so this was 10 years ago-- and a tough guy,

you know shaved head, deep scars in his head,

you know, a toughie.

So I said, oh fuck it, I'll take his picture anyway.

So I took his picture.

And he came over to me and he said,

you do that again he said I'll fucking--

and I didn't say a word because he could have fucking taken me

and threw me through the window.

MAX KOZLOFF: But this all seems quaint and archaic

now, because our definitions of the public

and the private sphere have been entirely

altered by new technologies and new social attitudes.

We're all exhibitionists, or people

who would like to be noticed, however

briefly, by electronic means.

So the idea of someone objecting to having a camera poked

in their face is obsolete.

Let me introduce myself, my name is Ricky Powell.

[cheering]

Oh shit, well thank you man, that's very nice of you,

because I'm usually used to getting dissed,

like I'm the bike messenger at home,

oh, who the fuck is this guy?

[funky music plays]

Ah, I listen to the blues hour on Jazz 88 every day,

3 o'clock.

I gotta have soundtrack as I walk through the streets.

My neighborhood has been infested by new Jack Cornballs,

so this helps me freeze them out.

[funky organ plays]

Yeah, well I've been living here 20 years on Charles street,

but I grew up in the village.

I met this weird, fucking weird, arty, crazy, crazy dressed girl

at Danceteria, we hit it off.

So we go to like Roxy's, and Danceteria, and all the clubs,

and she'd bring her little sure shot, a Minolta auto-focus,

hi-matic.

I took to it like, easy, actually, nat,

but I never took it seriously, it was

just something I did with her.

Spring of '85 she ditched me for some fucking scrub

who wore tie-dye yoga pants.

I was fucking-- I'm going to make this bitch sorry she

played me like a soggy cannoli.

I'm going to take this camera, and I'm

gonna fucking become something where

she fucking is gonna be mad sorry she dissed me like this.

Spring of '85, early like March, I

declared I'm going to take pictures,

I'm going to take pictures.

[funky music plays]

Yeah I've been a messenger, substitute schoolteacher,

frozen lemonade vendor, tour photographer.

I had my share of bullshit jobs, you know,

but I always bring a bring a camera with me

to battle the mundaneness of the job.

This I took in the summer of '86 from my frozen lemonade

stand, and I like this shot because the dog

is running shit.

And I got a famous shot of Cindy Crawford I took at the club MK.

I was a busboy, I went into the woman's bathroom to clean up.

I turn around and I seen this chick, I'm like, oh shit,

yo, you mind if I get a flat?

I guess my magnetism overtook her.

That's in the toilet stall right there.

Debbie Nassar, loved her, man.

Laurence Fishburne, love Laurence,

I don't know how I used to end up hanging out with him, man.

I got some good shots, he liked me.

Oh yeah, oh, oh yeah.

Oh snap.

RICKY POWELL: Run from Run-DMC would

come pick me up in his car and we'd drive around.

I'm just doing a photo shoot with Run-DMC.

Come over here man, I want to get the nice sundown.

It's nice, it's aesthetic.

Dondi White, the graffiti legend.

I don't know how I used to hang out with these dudes,

except they knew I was down.

RICKY POWELL: We're in the palace of the rap

Svengali Mr. Russell Simmons.

Alice.

How are you bud?

Cold, Ricky.

I love the way you've, you know,

dressed for today's interview.

My most well known photo, probably Warhol-Basquiat.

Went to Shafrazi to see the Warhol-Basquiat opening.

I meet up with Zephyr and Revolt,

they were like a dynamic duo of graffiti.

And I used to just be, like, on their jock.

And then we noticed Warhol and Basquiat coming from Houston

street, and I was just like, hey, you

mind if I get a quick flick?

Or some shit, I don't know.

And they looked at me.

Basquiat had seen me around, he was always nice to me.

They stopped for me, posed, I took the shot,

I said, thanks man.

So I had just shot two great dynamic duos in the same minute

at the onset in my career so-- career.

And hustling is like, actually my main occupation.

Hustling.

That's what it is man, waking up, making sure you wake up

in the daytime, putting your pants on, making the calls,

getting out of the house, maneuvering,

you know I don't take those for granted.

I have to be prepared because even dope shot might arise,

even when I just go to the deli, and it happens.

You know street photography to me is like my transistor radio,

the playlist is infinite.

There was no reason I shouldn't have a camera because all I had

to do is uh-- and if you can't do this, if this is too much,

then, you know, I was in the wrong business.

[electronic music plays]

I find it very difficult to take a photograph

without a person knowing.

Occasionally I will, but there's still

something magical about being able to approach a stranger

and convince them that you are sincere.

JAMEL SHABAZZ: In 1977 I joined the military.

I said to myself, when I return back to the states,

I will never be without images.

I returned during the summer of 1980, and I came on a mission

to just shoot and recapture different stages of my life,

so I was with a camera every single day,

from that point to this very day.

You know, when I was downtown in Brooklyn photographing

the posses, the crews, I realized the psychology

of photography for me.

You see the alpha and I would study my subjects first,

because being a military man, we learned

the science of recognizance, and recognizing leadership.

So I would see that alpha male or female I was studying

for a few, and I knew that I had to approach

him first in order to get the permission

to shoot everybody else.

And alphas are normally the male who has the jury on, you know,

he's distinguishable.

And I would compliment him, because was

the psychology also, to compliment my subjects and say,

you know what?

I'm looking at you, and I recognize power and strength,

and I can tell that you are a very powerful person.

He'd say, you know what?

Yeah I am.

I would photograph him, and go get it blown up,

and bring him back to him, and he would show all his people

and say, yo look at this.

So then they would all want photographs.

They gave me the name picture man, and I was just there.

I left at the age of 17 to go into the military,

I came home at 20, so a lot of things

I wasn't exposed to during my youth, but when I returned,

I saw prostitution and homelessness

for the first time.

And for whatever reason I wanted to capture it.

So I would go out and I would just, not only

take photographs, but I was really curious on why

these women became homeless, and try to get them off the street

at age 20 years old.

So in a sense I became a street teacher,

and I had a reason behind what I was doing.

And it was dangerous in the beginning.

And I saw a prostitute performing a sex act

on a religious figure, and I shot it without asking,

and she started screaming, and the customer

ran off without paying her.

So her screams summons her security, her pimp.

And I had said to them, with all due respect, before you

attack me, let me at least explain what I did,

and why I did it.

And in my explanation, the person he says, you know what?

I respect you.

And he says, from this point on, you have my permission to come

out here any time and shoot.

He says, the only thing you just have to do in the future

is ask.

So what that did for me at that time,

it taught me the importance of asking.

And I was criticized for that as time

would go on because people would say that my work is too posed.

But what it was with me, I would ask.

With all due respect, my name is Jamel Shabazz,

may I take a photograph of you?

The smile is a reflection of what I gave them.

So when I look at the smiles that I see in my photographs,

I created an atmosphere which made them feel good.

And that makes me feel good to know

that I was able to do that.

[electronic music plays]

MARY ELLEN MARK: I was born in the suburbs of Philadelphia,

I can remember when I was eight years old walking

home from, like, third grade and saying,

I got to get out of here.

And I stayed with that, and I really always thought

about my freedom, and I always thought about moving to New

York, even when I was a child.

When I first came to New York, I would

go to the parks, the Central Park,

and I would also, which I still do, try and find out when there

were events, shoot around them, not necessarily the parade

itself.

I still love the street and I still go out on the street.

It's a challenge to work on the street.

The hardest photography you do is

street photography, actually, because you have

to really think on your feet.

You go down the street and you turn right,

and something amazing happens.

You don't make that turn, you left and nothing happens.

You have to make a picture in that very moment,

and I'm old school in the sense-- well

I'm an analog photographer but, I'm

old school in the sense that I don't believe in cropping,

that I believe you have to make the picture in the camera.

It's harder to be a woman than a man,

I'll definitely admit that.

The disadvantages came more with business,

with people not maybe wanting to assign you

as much in the beginning, but also

the disadvantage of strength, just physical strength.

But I think there's also an advantage to being a female,

if you're a street photographer, because I can walk down

the street and I can and knock on a door,

and someone will let me in.

I'm less threatening than a man.

I think often your subject matter

can show you what the picture is, makes it for you.

So I'm not a strong believer in heavy duty concepts

when I do portraits of people.

I sort of like it to come from people.

I try and make iconic images.

They're hard to make, but that's my goal, is to make images

that stand on their own.

Not to tell a particular story, I think film tells a story.

Still pictures should be single, very powerful, images.

I don't know whether my pictures cause social change,

I think that maybe they make people aware,

and I think it's important for people to be aware.

I think today the fine art world, at this moment,

does not really appreciate reality, or documentary work.

And I think it's too bad, because for me that's

the work I collect, and that's the work I love,

and that was my choice of a career.

I love photographs about humans, or animals,

I love animals too, but, you know, humans and animals.

The art world, they're always thinking in terms of decoration

and those kind of strong images aren't as decorative.

There are so many great documentary photographers,

and we're not having the opportunity to see their work.

And I think that's very sad, because my favorite

photographs, and I think historically

the pictures that I love, are the photographs

that are about reality.

JEFF MERMELSTEIN: Street photography

is really not what people are talking about,

it's a little retro.

So to maintain that enthusiasm is difficult.

There's less of us that will take

35 millimeter street photographs, you know,

their whole life.

[bass playing]

As I become older I feel more in touch with the importance

of what I, and others like I, am doing,

and that is, rendering the human condition,

showing the world and life as it is.

Us picture makers are responsible for doing

that in an honest, and way that is unique to our own selves,

to make a contribution.

I'm recording life now my way.

I think this might be the first roll I ever shot, right here.

And indeed it is.

Indeed it is, 1966.

Right out into the street.

Well there's pictures is everywhere,

my God, if you're in the mood.

But, you know, it's like if you're in a your bad mood,

everybody on the bus looks like a maniac, or a terrible freak,

or a moron.

And when you're in a good mood, and you can't help it,

you smile at someone-- surprise, they smile back.

Like, every picture has to say, only in New York.

BOOGIE: Sometimes I leave my house, and by the time

I reach Manhattan I would shoot three rolls,

because there's always-- stuff is always changing,

there's always something new, life is different,

people are different.

I'm just trying to show things as they are, without bullshit,

without judging people.

I am more and more excited about what I do.

I shoot more and more, because I think I have less time

left on this planet, I guess.

A street can be like a nerve ending It's not the street,

it's the life on the street, or where the street takes you,

that's important.

It's out there, you know, I'll go

on just trying to get it right, still trying to get it right.

Photography is about description.

It just describes things.

That's all the camera does, your point it, you press the button,

it describes what's in front of it.

Something happens, some personal thing happens.

Even though it's a machine, and even though it uses a fraction

of a second of time, we learn, as human beings,

how to understand those minute little exchanges.

And I'm much happier being out on the street, mixing it up,

with the chance quality of things

potentially appearing out of ordinary reality.

A slice of a moment.

A thousandth of a second of recognition.

And if you can accept that, then you can operate that way.

There are plenty of people who don't have that kind of belief.

That the world's going to present itself in that way,

and so they don't see it because they're not looking for it.

[piano and bass playing]

[electronic music playing]