On View: Feb 11 - Mar 12, 2023
The Eyes of the City, the first major retrospective of legendary New York street photographer Richard Sandler, will be on display at the Bronx Documentary Center. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, February 11th. The exhibition will feature work from his monograph, The Eyes of the City, along with never-before-seen prints from his extensive archive.
With an incisive eye and peerless craft, Sandler prowled the streets of New York from the late 1970s until September 11, 2001, capturing a changing city, with its dramatic juxtapositions of class and race laid bare in his frame. Sandler is among the all-time greats of street photography; his work has been praised as “at once political, aesthetic, and emotionally stirring,” by LensCulture, with photographs that take viewers on “a wild and wandering journey,” according to The Washington Post.
In addition to Sandler’s prints, a trilogy of his first-person documentary films will be shown at the exhibition: The Gods of Times Square, Sway, and Brave New York. Sandler’s films capture the essence of Times Square and the East Village in the 90s as these quintessential parts of New York City faced gentrification and real estate speculation, forcing many New Yorkers from the neighborhoods they once inhabited.