For my final portfolio, I am focusing on Richard Sandler’s Photobook Eyes of the City. Richard Sandler is an American photographer best known for his street photography, which is currently held in collections at institutions including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum. Sandler was born in 1946 and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. As a young boy, he would often skip school and travel to Manhattan  because he “just loved being out on the streets. I grew up in 60s New York where the world was on parade. Everything happened on the street.” 

This fascination with “the lives of those in the city” would later lead him to take on photography as a career (Jonathan Ames, Afterword, 175). Before he began a photographer, however, Sandler moved to Boston in 1968 to become a macrobiotic chef. It was in Boston that he would pick up a camera and begin to develop his career in photography. As he stated in a recent interview, “photography came along in 1976. A friend loaned me a 35MM camera and I was immediately hooked. It was love at first sight. Like the New York School Photographers, Sandler continued to shoot with 35 mm film. Sandler also later engaged in documentary filmmaking and produced films “The Gods of Times Square” and “Brave New York.” 

Eyes of the City, which is Sandlers first and only photobook, contains a collection of “snapshots taken in Boston and New York, spanning the late 1970s through the last days before the planes struck on 9/11,” although it was not published until 2016 (Dave Isay, Foreword, 5). Even though Sandler of course did not know this at the time, his works have come to reflect a New York lost after 9/11, in a similar fashion to how Roman Vishniacs photos of shtetls have become emblematic of a Jewish way of life that disappeared after the Holcoaust. 

Eyes of the City is filled with street photography Sandler took in both New York and Boston between 1997 and 1992 that captures ironic situations and paradoxes that are unique and constant in a big city. His photos take a particular interest in the people within the street and how they move in their surroundings rather than the streets themselves. However, Sandler does not appear to relate to his subject matters or feel alienated from them. Instead, his stance feels removed, impersonal, and often even cold. They remind me a bit of the Jewish ethnographic photos we’ve looked at, (but have a modernist aesthetic twist and reflect a desire to be artistic, not scientific). 

This theme of nostalgia and the lives of people in a city which no longer exists is something I am interested in further exploring. However, as New York Times writer David Gonzalez notes, “Sandler finds moments where composition and subject meld in a way that goes beyond nostalgia, or challenges notions about a broken city.” The elements of decay and beauty, or old and new, gives us a sense of a city in transition. This transition is shrouded in “layers of meaning and mystery,” embedded deep within the chaotic juxtapositions of Sandler’s works, which makes them “images that shake you hard by the shoulders and remind you what’s real and what’s really important.” (Dave Isay, Foreword, 6). 

Sandler has stated that he is “hopefully making people aware of some of the political realities on the street.” Although they often contain very specific subjects, Sandlers photos have a timeless quality to them and a consistently relevant message about the reality of all that comes with living in a big city.

Methodology

As a Street Photographer with a focus on ironic chance juxtapositions occurring in the city, Sandler’s methodology involves wandering the streets, always looking around for spontaneous moments to capture. Sandler wants to document people doing things in a raw way that is in no way posed (and he seldom engages his subjects). You get the sense Sandler is just walking around with his finger glued to his camera’s shutter and when he sees an interesting mix of subjects on the street he snaps a photo and keeps moving. Indeed, Sandler claims he still carries his Leica everywhere. 

As a result, his photos are also spontaneous in terms of form – maybe also in part due to his lack of formal training (as mentioned above, he was a macrobiotic chef before taking up photography as a profession). Most of his works do not have a central focal point or organized composition. We can see this spontaneity in the way some of his photos have people very close to the lens which is very blurry because they are quickly walking by, while the rest of the frame is still. The juxtapositions expressed in his photographs are enhanced by playing with perspective and the use of light and dark and shooting with flash at times not considered traditionally appropriate. The choice to shoot in black and white adds to this contrast and also creates a timeless feel.

For my personal photography part of the project, I took photos around the city of Paris. Like Sandler, I looked for spontaneous and ironic juxtapositions between people and their environments as well as and paradoxical trends such as modernity and decay, advertisements vs reality, and poor and rich. I tried to take photos that captured unique moments and made my viewers think about the reality and constant motion of life in a big city in the same timeless way as Sandler.

For example, in the first two photos below, there is a strong contrast between a very disturbing reality and beauty. I am not sure exactly what the context is for Sandler’s photo, but a body is presented tied up right next to a gated off perfectly kept and pristine array of flowers. I tried to capture the same disturbing sentiment here in my photograph through a triangle between the homeless man, the statue, and the old man. I also tried to replicate Sandler’s irregular cropping and lack of clear focal point.  

Although I had planned to take photos only in black and white, I decided to keep some images in color because I felt like the colors heightened the juxtapositions I was hoping to create. 

Attempting to take my own photos in the style of Richard Sandler helped me realize a number of important things about Sandler’s work and process. 

The first is that to take photos like Sandler, so to take photos of split moments, you need to be on the street all of the time and hyper-aware of everything around you. And even more than that, you need to have your camera ready on the shutter while you are on the street.

For example, in ___, Sandler would have had to have had his camera ready to shoot. The way the two men in suits with briefcases frame the women on the corner to create a symmetry within the composition   only occurred for this split second.

Similarly, if I did not have my camera out ready to shoot, I would not have been able to capture this motorcycle driver speeding past this statue. His speed is clear from the blurriness with which he is captured and stands in contrast to the still white marble statue behind him. 

There were numerous moments that I would have liked to capture but was not able to, even though I had my camera on me because I was not quick enough at getting it out and the moment passed by the time I was ready. As Sandler noted in a recent video interview, a lot of street photography has to do with situations that are beyond the photographers control, or getting lucky. To “get lucky” however, one had to put themselves in these situations and always be aware.

Something else I realized and which was a big challenge for me was that people do not like to be photographed by strangers, especially up close and with flash. I went into this project imagining I would take a lot of close-up shots of passersbys, but I became very aware of this negative attitude towards getting your photo taken on my first day when I got into an altercation with a very angry man who tried to make me pay for the photo I took of him and then delete it when I refused.

This challenge was heightened by the fact that I was in Paris, a foreign country, where I am not fluent in the language. Sandler was able to take photos in Boston and New York pretty interchangeably, but I did not feel like I had the right to take photos in Paris, at least in the same way I would feel like I did in New York where I am not a tourist.

And most of all, I did not think about the difference between being a man and a woman. As we spoke about with Bruce Gillman vs Michelle Groskoff, there is a different dynamic and kind of vulnerability which comes with being a woman alone taking photos of people on the street.

In light of these challenges, I realzied I was going to have to modify my initial plan and come up with some creative ways to capture unfiltered, raw humanity in the city. This is when I came to the idea of photographing sculptures, statues and cemeteries, which constitute the photos I am the most proud of. They provided me with great juxtapositions to the modernizing, sometimes decaying and suffering city. Moreover, since they were often found in more “touristy” parts of the city, no one questioned someone taking photos and I loved capturing interactions between statues and their environments as well as statues and the people around them.

One theme that I hoped to incorporate into my own photos that I feel like I accomplished was the blurring as well as juxtaposition between media, or the ideal and reality. There are countless examples of this in Sandler’s work, but one the stood out to me was:

Also, I paid attention to Sandler’s theme of him looking at people looking at other people on the street

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Richard Sandler was not the first Jewish street photographer and he will not be the last. He is also not the first or only to capture anonymous interactions and juxtapositions in an ironic way. However, the consistency with which Sandler does this creates a cohesiveness to his work that makes it stand out. Every passing moment he captures is loaded with social commentary and reflects a decisive decision to immortalize it. 

Like many Jewish photographers, Sandler seems to understand the power of capturing the issues of the time and the power the photo medium carries for remembrance. This is particularly the case because many of his works have been understood as relics of a New York which disappeared with 9/11 and document the ideal with the reality of life in a big city. And more generally speaking, his images serve as mementos for a time with an increasingly blurred relationship between people on the street and the idealized world of media and advertising. My photograph of macron juxtaposed with a working man and statues against buildings attempt to mirror the raw emotions captured by Sandler, which are both ultra-specific and timeless. This experience has helped me think about how to be thought-provoking and self aware when taking photographs, and I know this will continue to be true as I take photographs in the future. 

Bibliography 

       Sandler, Richard. 2016. The Eyes of the City. Brooklyn, Ny: Powerhouse Books.

        Gonzalez, David. 2017. “Beauty, Politics and Humor in a Rapidly Changing City.” Lens Blog. October 26, 2017. https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/beauty-politics-and-humor-in-a-rapidly-changing-city/.

       “Richard Sandler: Street Photographer | Glitteratiincorporated.” n.d. Glitteratiinc.com. Accessed December 3, 2022. https://glitteratiinc.com/blogs/the-click/16106764-richard-sandler-street-photographer.

      “Brooklyn Museum.” n.d. Www.brooklynmuseum.org. Accessed December 3, 2022. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/artists/8909/objects.

       “Works | Richard Sandler | People | the MFAH Collections.” n.d. Emuseum.mfah.org. Accessed December 3, 2022. https://emuseum.mfah.org/people/5763/richard-sandler/objects.

       “An Interview with Richard Sandler.” 2022. Isabella Greenwood, UNCTONAMINATED | News. June 12, 2022. https://news.uncontaminated.co/2022/06/12/an-interview-with-richard-sandler/.