My move to New York happened overnight. I met Peter in Oakland, California during Pride Week in July of 1991. He was an old friend of a dear friend. I went to visit him in December 1991.
I had no concept of the East Village, where he lived. I arrived at his house in Manhattan around Christmas and found fifteen people sitting in a 1850s tenement apartment drinking Jim Beam whisky and listening to house music. The wooden floors sloped, as did the horsehair-plastered ceiling. This group became my family for over five years, and I am still close to a few of them.
Some of them have died.
I moved to New York in February 1992, and moved in first with Natasha and then with Peter four months later, after our apartment was robbed. Someone told me that Natasha, who was from Haiti, had dolls that resembled some of us and had been sticking needles into them.
New York then was vibrant, edgy. David Dinkins was still the mayor. There were crack addicts on our street.I got mugged twice in that first year but it didn't deter me from exploring Manhattan by night. I went out at least four nights a week, and spent a lot of time in bars and walking on the streets south of 14th Street. My favourite was Bob’s Bar. I often managed to get a free drink from the bartender there.
Maurice was Peter’s best friend. He took me to my first dive bar in the East Village, Sophie’s, where they served mugs of dark beer. Peter worked the night shift at a post office, and Maurice would often crash at our place. He would always come over after 4 am, when the bars closed, and sleep either on my mattress or on Peter's because he was at work. Peter would get back from work at around 9am and we would all drink cheap, muddy Bustelo coffee. Maurice died a few years ago after a prolonged illness. I saw him in the morgue, and I will ever forget the way he looked. I would like to remember the way he looked in his earlier years, when men and women were taken by his charm.
Taquana was an aspiring model. A few years after I met her she had a daughter with the A&R person at Tommy Boy Records. She loved to dance, and she, Peter and others would go out to dance at 2am on the weekends and come back before the sun went down. I was usually at the restaurant or the copy shop where I worked and I would find them at the house napping when I returned.
I started to photograph this community of friends as often as I could, or when I could afford to. Money was always scarce and most of it was spent in bars. I managed to make a little extra cash bar-backing and doing coat check at a restaurant on the Upper West Side.
As this community grew, I started to meet more photographers and found inspiration in how they had managed to make a living taking photographs. I started experimenting with portraiture, playing around with basic lighting. I carried my camera around with me as much as I could.
I also started to go to various protests in the city. It helped me to connect to the city and it’s politics. I imagined myself being a street photographer. I got a shared darkroom in Williamsburg and I would go there a few times a week. My printing was basic, but after a few years I met photographers who worked for the Village Voice and they taught me how to really print. I found them extremely inspiring, and found myself emulating them. It took me many years to find my own language.
The Central Park and Brooklyn music scene was a place of great joy for a lot of us. We spent a lot of time in the sun listening to the bands and the freestyle musicians. The community of friends grew, it became incestuous, there were fights, friendships that fell out, but the love for each other was always there.
Watching others, I started to play around with various formats. I experimented a lot with slide film and as soon as I saw someone using a square format I found myself enamoured with the twin lens and the size and I decided to get myself a Rolleiflex. I mostly did portraits with it. I lived day to day, week to week, never making long-term plans, but that seemed to suit me just fine.
Some of these images were used Aperture magazine: Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In: Aperture 243 – 15 June 2021
The work below was part of a group show titled The Surface of Things held at the at Alliance Francaise, New Delhi in 2017 and Bhau Daji Lad Musueum, Mumbai in 2018.
Exhibition design at Alliance Francaise, New Delhi and Bhau Daji Lad Museuum, Mumbai
