Richard Sandler CC Train 1985
Richard Sandler CC Train 1985

RICHARD SANDLER

The award-winning photographer/filmmaker, Richard Sandler, shot the streets of New York City from 1977 until the early 2000s, reflecting on the joys and stresses of urbanity.

BIO

Richard Sandler is a street photographer and documentary filmmaker. He has directed and shot eight non-fiction films, including “The Gods of Times Square,” “Brave New York” and “Radioactive City.”

Sandler’s still photographs are in the permanent collections of Brooklyn Museum, Center for Creative Photography - University of Arizona, Houston Museum of Fine Art, Museum of the City of New York, New York Historical Society, New York Public Library.

He was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for photography, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for Filmmaking, and a New York State Council on the Arts fellowship for Filmmaking.

The Eyes of the City was published by powerHouse Books in 2016.

Richard Sandler The Hopefuls, Studio 54 1981
richard sandler

The Hopefuls, Studio 54, 1981

"Because of the density of the spaces depicted in Richard’s frames, tension is rife: for example, children and families are forced into uncomfortable proximity with the pornographic advertisements that were a pillar of pre-Giuliani Times Square in the 1980s. Bystanders become inadvertently complicit in a narrative they are unaware exists. No one is spared exposure in Richard’s street" - Serge J-F. Levy

You could say, 'look how f----- up New York was in the 80s, look at all this graffiti,' but also it was very beautiful," he says. "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.

Richard Sandler
Richard Sandler Double Date 1985
Richard Sandler Double Date 1985