GALLERY 881
881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_
THE EYES OF THE CITY EXHIBITION
Exhibition with photographer and filmmaker Richard Sandler
Exhibition
September 7 - September 28, 2024
Opening Reception
September 7, 2024 from 2 - 5 pm
SlideNight (Tickets)
September 19, 2024, 7pm
Artist Talk
September 28, 2024, 2pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
The photographs in this show were made in New York City (and to a lesser extent) in Boston, from February 1977 to the Summer of 2001. They depict the “recent past,” an uncomfortable time, that lives in historical limbo. They are too young to be a record of the distant past, and too old to resemble contemporary culture. These street pictures reveal the time just before the proliferation of computers, cell phones, digital cameras and the Internet. For better and for worse one was simply “on the street,” in public space, bathing in the comforts, or terrors, of the human sea. There was no way to filter the reality of the broken city and there was no refuge in virtual space. In the underground, graffiti tags and spray painting exploded onto every surface, and whole subway cars were “bombed,” windows and all. Crime and crack cocaine were epidemic, rents were inexpensive and tourists were too scared to come to NYC. The Times Square and East Village streets were drug addled and dangerous, while in mid-town the insulated rich wore furs in unprecedented numbers. Ronald Reagan was the U.S. president for eight of those years, “greed was good” and Y2K hysteria was approaching. To some the New York City of the recent past was a hell on Earth. To others it was one of New York’s most fertile artistic periods. I offer these photographs as marbled evidence of beauty, humor and decay mixed with a healthy dose of cultural critique, and as questions about colonial life itself. All of the photographs in the show were shot on film and printed on silver gelatin paper by master printers, Sid Kaplan, Bob Klass and myself. After the disaster of 9/11/01 I put the still camera on the back burner and recorded only video with sound. It seemed to me, that "silent" still photography was too poetic of a medium to convey the heartbreak, fear and chaos of that time.
ARTIST BIO
Richard Sandler, (b.1946) is a street photographer and documentary filmmaker. His still photographs are in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of the City of New York and the Center for Creative Photography. Sandler was awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships for photography, (1992, 1998), a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for Filmmaking, (2006), and a New York State Council on the Arts fellowship for Filmmaking (2009). Sandler worked as a freelance photojournalist for 35 years; his clients included the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, Boston Magazine and The Real Paper (Boston).
Richard has directed and shot eight non-fiction films, including “The Gods of Times Square,”(1999), “Brave New York” (2004) and “Radioactive City,” (2011). Presently, Sandler's documentary film, “AKA Martha’s Vineyard” is in post production; it recounts the lovely island’s history, told from Wampanoag first nations' perspectives. His first monograph,"The Eyes of the City," (powerHouse Books, 2016) is in it’s third printing, and two other (street and subway) books are in the works. From 1985-1993 Richard taught street and documentary photography classes at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
In Canada, Richard Sander is represented by Gallery 881.