By Jonathan Shih
Richard Sandler is an award-winning photographer/filmmaker, who shot the streets of New York City from 1977 until the early 2000s. A native New Yorker, Richard was born in Queens in 1946. At the age of ten, he was riding the subway into the city to take in the excitement of Times Square. In 1977, he decided to leave a career as a chef and then acupuncturist before jumping headfirst into photography. With no formal training, Richard soaked up any information he could find; books, advice from roommates, a photo history class, and a photo workshop with Garry Winogrand. After a short stint in Boston, he moved back to New York to shoot some of the sincerest photographs of that era.
“You could say, ‘look how fup New York City was in the 80s, look at all this graffiti, but also it was very beautiful,” he said. “The layering of randomness, of one person’s tagging over another, and it would go on for months and years, and it started to look like Jackson Pollock.”
Sandler, who earned money as a photojournalist, was constantly taking pictures. “I’d take the subway into the city with five rolls of film, get out on the street, and just shoot,” he added.
Richard stopped taking photos for a while after the 2001 terrorist attacks, focusing instead on documentary film. “After 9/11 put the still cameras down because the sound on the street, the protests and the marching and the soul-searching and the mourning and the arguing that went on in New York, the sound was more important,” he said.
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