Richard Sandler’s Spectacular Photos of New York City in the 1980s

New York City in the 1980s was nothing like the polished version sold to tourists. The city was deep in financial trouble, crime was high, and entire neighborhoods had fallen into disrepair. Graffiti blanketed the subway cars. Homeless men and women slept in doorways along the same avenues where fur-coated shoppers strolled past luxury storefronts. This was the city Richard Sandler chose to document, camera in hand, walking its streets and riding its trains.

Sandler’s photographs are black and white, which strips away distraction and forces the viewer to focus on the people. He worked close to his subjects — sometimes uncomfortably close — which gives his images an honesty that staged photography rarely achieves. He was not a journalist assigned to cover a story. He was simply a man with a camera who understood that the city’s most important moments were happening in plain sight, unannounced.

The subway system was one of Sandler’s most frequent subjects. In the 1980s, the trains were covered in tags from top to bottom, inside and out. Riders packed into cars alongside spray-painted walls, their expressions ranging from exhausted to completely blank. It was a daily experience for millions of New Yorkers, and Sandler treated it with the same seriousness as anything happening above ground.

Street life made up a large portion of his work. Vendors, commuters, children, police officers, protesters — all of them appear in his archive. On East 34th Street in 1980, he was already capturing the rhythm of the city at the start of the decade, long before the culture of that era became something people looked back on with nostalgia.

Fifth Avenue appears in his work repeatedly, and not by accident. The avenue carried contradictions that Sandler found worth recording. Wealth and poverty existed within feet of each other on the same block. Women in expensive fur coats walked past a homeless woman standing near overflowing trash. A very tall man drew stares from passersby who had seen everything the city had to offer — and still stopped to look.

Sandler’s subjects rarely posed. A woman peers at his camera lens with open distrust from a doorway on Fifth Avenue. Three children slump against their carer on a subway, exhausted. Two kids on 32nd Street stare at a homeless man with open curiosity, neither afraid nor fully understanding what they are seeing. These are not constructed scenes. They are moments that happened once and were caught.

He was not limited to the streets. Inside the women’s room on the Staten Island Ferry in 1978, a woman slumps in front of the mirror, catching her own reflection. At the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport that same year, he photographed the ordinary drama of arrivals and departures. At a Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale political convention in 1980, he was there with his camera, recording a different kind of New York moment.

The subway gave Sandler some of his most striking photographs. On the E train in 1983, riders sat beneath layers of graffiti that had become so normalized most barely noticed it. By 1986, some subway cars were so thoroughly covered in tags that the original color of the train was barely visible. A 1984 image shows a woman looking up from inside one of these cars, the painted walls surrounding her on all sides.

The city’s social divisions showed up clearly in his work. At an anti-gay demonstration on Sixth Avenue in 1989, a man speaks to a crowd. Young partygoers line up outside Studio 54 in 1982, dressed and ready for a night that had nothing to do with the poverty visible elsewhere in the same photographs. Rush hour at 57th Street in 1980 shows suited men moving in tight formation, the machinery of the city’s workforce in motion.