MICHAEL HARWOOD . 1967, NYC
In the Fall of 1967, I was a first term architecture student at Columbia University. Happily surprised to be assigned a photo essay - on “people using public spaces” - I purchased my first SLR and for a week recorded life in the city I’d known since birth. I checked out several neighborhoods and commuter venues, interpreting the assignment rather broadly. My presentation the next week suffered sorely from my inexperience with photography; I packed my work into an envelope and moved on to the next architectural assignment.
Last summer, 2019, curious about my earliest efforts, I found the envelope and took a look. What I saw were images full of life and a photographic sensibility, and which naturally had accrued meaning with the passage of time. Most apparent to me was what’s absent in the 1967 images that the city is conspicuously full of now: cell phones! and all they imply; huge shiny buildings; a vastly diverse population; throngs of tourists (at least until covid). I also saw a big-city kind of intimacy which we seem to have lost.
But here I still am in New York, working in ways I could not have imagined in 1967, and delighted to at last properly present the photos I made in that year.