7th Street – Tompkins Square, NY 1982

The Peripheral Vision Portfolio are works connected to the “Peripheral Vision” blog from Bill Schwab, where he shares stories of selected alternate photographs from his archives of never before-made-available prints. All come as high-quality pigment prints signed by the artist.

Title: 7th Street – Tompkins Square, NY 1982

“I’m living in the East Village on 6th Street between Avenues A and B. It’s 1982, so it’s not the neighborhood it is now. My apartment is in one of the few inhabitable buildings, and that’s not saying a lot. My rent is $350 a month for a cold-water, 4th-floor walk-up, which is almost all I make, but I’m close to work and don’t have to ride a subway or bus to get there. It’s a scary place for this midwestern boy. I grew up in Detroit, but I had never seen such conditions, let alone lived in them. Many of my neighbors were unhoused and lived on the street, and just around the block was Tompkins Square Park, which, at the time, was inhabited by hundreds of unhoused people. This was 6 years before the Tompkins Square Riots, where the police brutally attacked those living there along with those that had come to support them. It was still a time where most authorities took a hands-off approach as the East Village was not a priority and was at least 10 years away from gentrification. I would carry my trusty Olymous OM-1 with me everywhere hoping to hone my skills as a street photographer, but this particular subject was a hard image to make. I had never seen anything like this scene with my own eyes and it was shocking to me that this was allowed to happen here. That people lived like this. Here I was thnking I had it bad with no hot water, and this poor guy was using a bag full of newspapers as a pillow so he could sit up while living and sleeping in his doorway.”

Edition: Peripheral Vision – open
– Pigment Print
– 8 x 6 -inch image size
– 8.5 x 11 Hahnemühle Baryta
– Signed, titled, and dated by the artist on reverse
– Unmounted