Main Street

Main Street was my first body of work upon my return to the United States after a 10 year stint in the UK as a political refugee from the Nixon Administration. In the UK, I was deep in street photography, and had no idea things would be different, once home. Within nine months of my return, I was enrolled in the fine art masters degree in Photography program at the University of New York at Buffalo. I had to come up with a thesis project. A girlfriend told me about a boxing gymnasium near her dance studio downtown. I asked if I could take pictures (no flash), and I was good to go. I was brought into the program by a professor who loved street photography, but he left for California by the time I started, without a word...leaving me with a contemporary art professor who hated the genre. It was too late to switch horses in mid-stream. I plowed ahead, got an A, and my diploma. The emotional damage from other students and my prof, who all thought street photography was regressive, stupid, old, and retrograde, scarred me for years. I had never endured a critique, I never, before, had to defend my work, verbally. In the end, just said nothing. I did the work, and the thesis show at Big Orbit, was well received. The project shows the downtown Theatre District of Buffalo, N.Y, . a city hit hard by White Flight. Buffalo was the last of the old Rust Belt cities to receive revitalization federal funds for a face lift. Although the pictures look like they are from the 50's, they were taken in 1981. Downtown Buffalo is now recovered, is modern, clean, and trendy. It has a tram, and traffic has been reestablished. The boxing gym and the billiard hall are gone. The thin black line around the images shows the negative edge, proving that all images are composed in the camera, and there was no post camera cropping.