Bruce Gilden’s Gritty Pictures of 1970s and 1980s New York

After recently moving house, Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has selected around a hundred for his book Lost and Found. Extending from the desire to revisit the work of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure.

 

In Lost and Found, an extraordinary New York is portrayed, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. These pictures are almost all made without the use of flash which was – soon after – to become his trademark. Gilden reflects that he was “probably in a transition period at that time, wanting to use flash more and make more dramatic photos. Maybe that’s why I overlooked these images…”

 

In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the compositions—mostly horizontal—simmer with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye.