The magazine of the photo-essay
Sept 2016 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
by Langdon Clay
This series was started on a lark in 1974. I was trying to impress my
girlfriend by making a Hawaiian Lei out of mini slide viewers with
colorful little celluloid jewels in them. Nowadays that might sound a bit
quaint but the impulse to do it was probably not too different than
wanting to wow somebody on snapchat today. Might be apples and
oranges. Might not. That's the way it started but not the way it finished.
I had just switched from B&W to color. Night color. After two years of
wandering around lower Manhattan and Hoboken, NJ a few nights a
week with a Leica loaded with Kodachrome and a giant tripod meant
for an 8x10 view camera, which doubled as a mugger masher, I ended
with about 130 jigsaw puzzle pieces offering clues and snippets from
the urban environment of New York in the 1970s. These images were
shown in 1978 at the Victoria&Albert Museum and reproduced in the
French Zoom magazine (December 1976) and the American ROLLING
STONE but since then have mostly remained dormant. Now thanks to Gerhard Steidl and the benefits of nostalgia they
will ride again.
From the forthcoming book by Steidl
161 car.
253 car car.
A&P car.
Bar car.
Big wheel car.
Cell block Nova.
Checker 24.
Colonial Nova.
Fotomat car.
King’s Inn car.
Mercedes flowers car.
Overhang Pinto.
Silver fish.
Stucco lancer.
Stylecrest truck.
Wet stretch limo.
Pioneer flag car.
59th street bridge caddy.
American Hotel car.
