Sunday paper
Date: 1984
Place: Greenwich Village, NYC
Modus operandi: Getting some air
Weather: Gorgeous
Time: 1 am
Gear: Pentax ME Super
Medium: Kodachrome 64
Me: See. Click. move on.
My age: 33
Mindlessly long work days on Wall Street would always drive me out on the streets of New York for some walk-about pictures at the weekend, not to mention the ever present risk of a good mugging. I adopted rough clothes and my ‘don’t mess with me’ tough guy walk (OK, actually looking over my shoulder, ready to run) – such was early ’80s Manhattan. The world’s richest city with no proper policing or law and order. On Wall Street or off.
Greenwich Village was still trying to be hip and trendy then, though the reality was that it was overexposed in the media and $1mm wouldn’t get you very much in the shape of decent real estate. Still, it was fun for its squiggly streets and outrageous personalities.
Here’s one of those wealthy Manhattanites grabbing the Sunday paper in his megabucks co-op downtown.
What a great capture- marvelous! the composition, the colors, the framing the mood – it all works.
I really like the photograph. And it leads me to a question I’ve been wanting to ask – what is the etiquette of photography – can a person, such as the subject of this photograph have any expectations of privacy? What if one caught a person in a moment of undignified pose, should one not publish such a photograph? Could a parent not want a random stranger snapshotting her children? And so on. If one is wandering around with one’s camera, searching for shots, what boundaries should be respected?
This is probably a culture-specific question, so what are the rules in America?