{"id":6937,"date":"2022-10-25T20:11:52","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T20:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/liberatinglens\/?page_id=6937"},"modified":"2022-12-08T19:10:01","modified_gmt":"2022-12-08T19:10:01","slug":"katz-jaden-ruth","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/liberatinglens\/katz-jaden-ruth\/","title":{"rendered":"Katz, Jaden Ruth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thesis & Background<\/h2>\n
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For my final portfolio, I am focusing on Richard Sandler\u2019s Photobook <\/span>Eyes of the City.<\/span><\/i> Richard Sandler is an American photographer best known for his street photography, which is currently held in collections at institutions including the <\/span>Houston Museum of Fine Arts<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>Brooklyn Museum<\/span><\/a>. 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\u00a0 because he \u201cjust loved being out on the streets. I grew up in 60s New York where the world was on parade. Everything happened on the street.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This fascination with \u201cthe lives of those in the city\u201d would later lead him to take on photography as a career (Jonathan Ames, Afterword, 175). Before he began a photographer, however, <\/span>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, \u201c<\/span>photography came along in 1976. A friend loaned me a 35MM camera and I was immediately hooked. It was love at first sight.<\/span><\/a> 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 \u201cBrave New York.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Eyes of the City, which is Sandlers first and only photobook, contains a collection of \u201csnapshots taken in Boston and New York, spanning the late 1970s through the last days before the planes struck on 9\/11,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019ve looked at, (but have a modernist aesthetic twist and reflect a desire to be artistic, not scientific).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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, \u201cSandler finds moments where composition and subject meld in a way that goes beyond nostalgia, or challenges notions about a broken city<\/a>.\u201d The elements of decay and beauty, or old and new, gives us a sense of a city in transition. This transition is shrouded in \u201clayers of meaning and mystery,\u201d embedded deep within the chaotic juxtapositions of Sandler\u2019s works, which makes them \u201cimages that shake you hard by the shoulders and remind you what\u2019s real and what\u2019s really important.\u201d (Dave Isay, Foreword, 6).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sandler has stated that he is \u201chopefully making people aware of some of the political realities on the street.\u201d 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. <\/span><\/p>\n