I met Richard, the photographer/filmmaker at a party last weekend – super interesting guy who documents the changes in NYC through photography and film. We had a great conversation about the “old” New York in the mid-80′s, when I moved to NYC for the first time from my ex-hometown of Boston, MA. He’s going to be presenting both photography and film next week at Millennium Film Workshop, with an opening reception and screening on May 6th. Definitely worth a look.
MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP ANNOUNCES
A STILL PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION
"CC train," 1985, copyright Richard Sandler
Millennium Film Workshop
66 East 4th St. (between 1st and 2nd Avenues) East Village, N.Y.C.
Opening Reception: May 6th (Thursday) 6:00 ~ 8:00 PM
The photographs in this show were made in New York City between 20 and 30 years ago and they depict a crazy time that lives in limbo: they are too young to be the historicalrecords of the fuzzy past, and way too old to resemble contemporary culture, now moving at warp speed.These pictures of the recent past reveal a time just before the proliferation of computers, cell phones, I pods, digital cameras and the internet: there was no way to filter the realities of the broken city, and there was no refuge in virtual space. For better and for worse one was simply ”on the street,” in public space, bathing in the comforts, (or terrors), of the human sea.
In the subways, graffiti tags and spray painting exploded onto every surface and whole subway cars were “bombed,” windows and all.Above and below ground, crime and crack were on the rise,therefore rents were cheap and tourists didn’t come here.
Times Square and East Village streets were drugged-out, but they were also home to thousands of artists and dozens of art galleries and music clubs.In mid-town the gaudy rich wore furs in unprecedented numbers,Ronald Reagan was president, “greed was good,” and Y2K hysteria was beginning.
To some, the New York City of the recent past was a hell on Earth,yet to others it was one of New York’s most fertile artistic periods. For me the 80′s streets were a photographic celebration and a dance with it’s perennial ghosts.i shot 4 – 5 rolls of film nearly everyday, on the street and, in the subways.luckily, i was never attacked by a crack-head……badly.
Richard Sandler
Gallery Hours: Mon, Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat, Evenings 7pm-10:30pm
Sat 1pm-5pm & by appointment
Following the May, 6th opening reception –
SCREENING (free) 8pm
of Richard Sandler’s East Village documentary,
Brave New York (2004, 55:00)
“This is a love letter to his brave neighbors.” Film Threat
“Brave New York,” is a free-form documentary that loosely chronicles the last 12 years of intense change in the East Village “hood.” From the reopening of a newly curfewed Tompkins Square Park and Wigstock in ’92, to the destruction of the cherished Loisaida Community Gardens, to the yuppie invasions of the dot com years, to the present era, indelibly stamped with post 9/11 grief, this durable, lusty neighborhood survives in spite of a real estate gold rush that has excluded all but the well-to-do. The movie’s main voices are those of the artists and street people whose wisdom and commentaries upon the dominant culture give us pause amidst the speedy approach of a “Brave New World.”
Richard Sandler
SCREENING: April 30th Friday, 8:00pm
Millennium Film Workshop
will present Richard Sandler’s award-winning New York City documentary
The Gods of Times Square (1999, 112:00)
Admission: $8.00.
“The Times Square of legend takes a last loopy bow in Richard Sandler’s engaging documentary The Gods of Times Square.” – New York Times
Winner Best Documentary:
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Rotterdam International Film Festival
The Gods of Times Square is a documentary about a rich culture of religionists (myself included) who were drawn to the electric buzz of this fabled human meeting ground. There, at the “crossroads of the world,” amidst it’s cathedral-like spires, we arrived to profess the creeds of wildly differing varieties of personal religious experience. I am a New Yorker, and like most “natives” who loved Times Squares’ eclectic beat, we saw the place as magic on Earth, an island of choice and sanity in a Puritan culture. As a teenager in the early sixties, I gazed into the adult world through the looking glass of Times Squares’ poolrooms, sideshows, theaters and arcades. There was racism, sexism and classicism all over 1960′s America,but in the Times Square of that period those diseases were treatable with a mixture of one part high culture, and one part low culture: Shakespeare and legit theater on one corner, jazz, striptease and “b” movies on the other.
The work was shot over a six year period that witnessed a radical transformation of Times Square. Disney’s renovation of the New Amsterdam Theater started a development roll that ended with a totally corporatized landscape. Gone now are the Mom and Pop stores, squeezed out by a real estate gold rush. Gone too are the free spirits who made Times Square a ”speaker’s corner”. The former versions of Times Square offered it’s congregants a place to air their thoughts and blow off a little steam, now the choices are fewer, the prices are higher, and the “sin” is gone. When I began this project I realized that my lifelong interest and involvement in religion would find expression in this fondly remembered place of youth. I discovered that “The Gods of Times Square” was to be a eulogy. When Disney (and Rudolf Giuliani ) were finally done with Times Square,the place was “cleansed” of pornography, prostitution and an all-night street life.
Amidst these fundamental changes most of the Square’s rich underbelly of colorful characters and religious zealots stopped showing up. The Gods of Times Square thus records a time in New York City history when the place most identified with free speech and the soul of New York, changed from a democratic, inter-racial, common ground, to a corporate controlled soul-less theme park. The fabled “white way” now plays host to the newest of Gods: Mickey, Minnie and Goofy on one corner, Bugs, Daffy and Porky on the other…. God help Times Square!
Richard Sandler
