Richard Sandler’s The Eyes of the City gathers street photographs made between 1977 and the weeks immediately preceding September 11, 2001. The work begins with three years of photographing in Boston and continues in Sandler’s native New York, establishing a sustained record of metropolitan life across nearly a quarter century. Rather than treating the street as scenery, Sandler attends to its human frictions: passing gestures, collisions of class, and moments in which public behavior briefly becomes revealing.
His photographs are described by a combination of precision, humor, compassion, and irony. Those qualities matter particularly in the New York pictures. During the 1980s, crime and crack cocaine inflicted severe social damage on neighborhoods including Times Square, Harlem, and the East Village, while wealth was displayed conspicuously in Midtown and on Wall Street. Sandler worked within these contradictions, observing beauty and deterioration not as separate subjects but as simultaneous conditions of the city.
The later photographs register another kind of transformation. In the 1990s, policies intended to attract tourists and corporations accelerated gentrification, raised rents, and reshaped neighborhood character. Sandler’s long working span allows these changes to be read at street level, through bodies, clothing, expressions, and encounters rather than through detached urban analysis. The historical force of the book lies in this continuity of attention: one photographer repeatedly returning to public space as its social terms alter around him.
Published by powerHouse Books in 2016, the 180-page hardcover includes a foreword by Dave Isay and an afterword by Jonathan Ames; many of the photographs were presented in print here for the first time. For collectors of street and documentary photography, its significance rests on the concentration of a substantial body of work within a clearly defined period. It is both an authorial study of Sandler’s alert, unsentimental way of seeing and a visual record of Boston and New York before profound changes in the civic and psychological landscape.
