These vintage photos of New York show the heyday of the ‘Mean Streets’ look
Edward Grazda’s fresh images of tired times
Things tend to look grittier in hindsight. Maybe it’s the patina of age, or the strangeness of a distant era—or the black-and-white rendering—but a strange side effect of old photos is how they lend gravity to even the most innocuous subjects. Aging photographers know this best, often discovering much later that photos made in their formative years have accrued a depth that wasn’t there at inception. This mutability is part of what distinguishes photography, tethered as it is to our predilection for nostalgia. But pictures don’t actually change over time. It’s us, in our romanticizing of an opaque and intangible past, who compartmentalize time into orderly, discrete segments and call it history.
In New York City, nostalgia for the Bad Old Days runs especially deep. For some it’s a point of pride, others an affectation, but it’s a commonly articulated lament among New Yorkers that “the city has changed” from its original, rougher, tougher self. Of course this sentiment is cyclical. In the 1920s people were waxing nostalgic about the Bowery of the late 19th Century; by the 60s they were dwelling on Prohibition-era mob stories that cast the city in dark hues of danger. These days the point of reference for New York at its most real is the 1970s. Convenient, then, that many of the photographers who documented that era have reached retirement age and now have plenty of time to look back on their early archives.
Edward Grazda is part of this trend, and yet his hurried snapshots from Manhattan four decades ago scan as much more than the sentiment pandering typified by our current moment of retro 70s chic. Their authenticity is palpable, not for the requisite prostitutes and Bowery bums in the frame, but because Grazda’s youthful eye is moving freely through a city in the throes of change. Unlike pictures, cities never stay the same (which, after all, is why they are so alluring to young artists). Mean Streets, the photographer’s new book of old photos from his early years in New York, strikes an anxious, quick tone as a formal response to the entropy unfolding before his lens. Grazda is searching here, for himself as an artist of course, but also for a city he knows is there but can’t quite grasp.
Mean Streets, by Edward Grazda, is published by Powerhouse Books.
