Loisaida New York Street Work 1984-1990

Medium: 6 x 9 cm, 645 and 35mm color negative formats scanned to produce archival pigments prints.

In 1984, at the age of 23, I moved to my first New York City apartment.

It was in a tenement building on Clinton Street on the Lower East

Side. I worked as a freelance photo assistant and spent much of my spare time

photographing as I wandered the streets exploring the neighborhood. The

1980s Lower East Side, also known as Loisaida, was as gritty, authentic, and humble as it was exotic, vibrant, and colorful. My third floor apartment had a great view of the bustling and noisy corner of Clinton and Stanton Streets. The urban soundtrack was music (namely merengue and salsa), fighting (organized or otherwise), loud talking and yelling (mostly in Spanish), and family gatherings on the neighboring fire escapes. It was like an ongoing opera. I loved living there.

I left the neighborhood and the work behind in 1990 when I began photographing

in Cuba, for what would become The Cuba Archive: Photographs 1990–1996. The negatives I made during my time on the Lower East Side languished in boxes—the majority never edited or printed—until a pandemic driven deep dive into my archives. Resurrecting this series through editing, scanning, and sequencing for book form, I see how the melding cultures and humanity I encountered inspired these photographs. The Lower East Side’s history, its cultural legacy, and the visual trove of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagery of the area, as I knew it then,

were navigational tools. And while the cultural and socioeconomic events

of the time no doubt subconsciously influenced my practice, I simply went

out and photographed, unencumbered by the “big picture” of what I

was doing, responding instinctively to my environs, drawn in by fleeting

moments, gestures, color, and light. So much has changed since the genesis of Loisaida; the way in which we view images and the language we use to discuss them, and the very craft itself of making photographs. We consider the content of images as well as how and why they were produced through the prism of time and

ever-evolving ideas and philosophies about the medium. As I consider

these rediscovered images, I apply a contemporary perspective to what

are now historical photographs. I see this as a new body of work that lives

at the intersections of my encounters, my engagement with photography,

and viewers’ observations.The images are my visual responses to a 1980s Lower East Side that has since been radically altered through waves of gentrification. Universally, the images speak to the human condition. They reflect what is eternal

and what is intrinsically New York City—vibrancy, diversity, coexistence,

and eccentricity.

Damiani Editore-Italy will publish Loisaida New York Street Work 1984-1990 in the spring of 2023. Sean Corcoran, the senior curator of prints and photographs of The Museum of the City of New York will contribute an essay.