Photos: Willy Spiller’s images from the left and right coasts gave new meaning to sun and grit
The Swiss photographer captured warmth in human misery, icy indifference in the L.A. sun
New York was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Blue collar jobs were gone. Social services had been slashed. The streets were dangerous and the subway deadly. When lightning caused a widespread blackout in the summer of 1977, people smashed storefront windows and emptied shelves. The city’s social fabric was going up in flames alongside a hundred Brooklyn buildings.
On the opposite coast, the film and music industries lured dreamers to sunny California. While the middle class was fleeing New York, Los Angeles’ population would soon eclipse Chicago as the country’s second largest. The sun might have been hidden behind smog, but Governor Jerry Brown was at the helm of Spaceship Earth and actors could work at vegetarian cafes until their big break.
Willy Spiller lived in both cities, having emigrated from Switzerland during New York’s darkest hours. In the east, he looked at a landscape of urban decay and saw flowers growing up through the cracks. Hip hop was booming in the Bronx and punk rock brewing in the Bowery. Writers and artists and filmmakers were crossing over from the Downtown scene into the mainstream. Spiller saw past the obvious miseries and focused on the people dancing and thriving in the wreckage.
For Spiller, riding the subway was not a daily drudgery but an exploration of cultures and ideas. Through his lens, New York didn’t seem like such a scary place.
Three thousand miles away, in Los Angeles, Spiller seemed reduced to producing portraits of nameless faces. There were palm trees and swimming pools, opulence and glamour, but none of the solidarity in suffering that New Yorkers shared on packed subways or crowded sidewalks. In a city defined by freeways and traffic there was no way to shake hands, introduce yourself, and ask questions. People were living in the fast lane and Spiller could only shoot from a distance, peering in from the outside. Maybe the tone would have changed as LA stumbled over its own roadblocks, as the city became as famous for crack cocaine and gangs as it was for Disneyland and Hollywood, but by 1985, Willy Spiller was heading back to Europe.
Willy Spiller: Street Life NY/LA 1977–1985 is exhibiting at Bildhalle through January 27th, 2018. Prints are available for sale through the gallery.
