The black and white photos in Mean Streets, collected here in print for
the first time, offer a look at the infamously hardscrabble NYC in the
70s and 80s captured with the deliberate and elegant eye that propelled
Grazda to further success.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, the institutions of power in New York
had failed. A bankrupt city government had sold its power over to the
banks, and the financiers' severe austerity programs gutted the city's
support systems.
Most of the city's traditional industries had already left, and those
power brokers in charge of the new system retreated to their high rises
and left the streets to the hustlers, preachers, and bums; the workers
struggling to get by; and a new generation of artists who were squatting
in the empty industrial buildings downtown and bearing witness to the
urban decay and institutional abandonment all around them.
For the tough and determined, the quick and the gifted, the prescient
and the prolific, a cheap living could be scratched out in the mean
streets.
Renowned photographer Edward Grazda began his career in that version of
NYC. The black and white photos in Mean Streets, collected here in print
for the first time, offer a look at that desolate era captured with the
deliberate and elegant eye that propelled Grazda to further success.
It's a version of New York that has been all but scrubbed clean in the
financially solvent years that have followed, but the character of the
city has been indelibly marked by the scars of those years.
