When 42nd Street Was Still Gritty

	© Langdon Clay
	Click photo for more images.

In 1979, photographer Langdon Clay created a meticulous panoramic of the seedy Times Square block of 42nd Street, which epitomized the grunge New York politicians were pledging to "clean up." Originally made with an 8x10 view camera and physically spliced together into a 15-foot print, the panoramic has now been recreated digitally. Below, friend and fellow photographer William Greiner explores Clay's original creative process and the changes that time has wrought on the street, as well as the artist.

William Greiner: When did you start making color photographs?
Langdon Clay: Late '74 or thereabouts. For one thing it was more expensive and for another you couldn't print it yourself. So it took a while to get to it. Mainly I woke up one day and wondered why I spent so much time trying to perfect a world I wasn't actually seeing, or as far as I could tell anybody else was seeing. Odd that so many people have done so well in an abstract world of 50 or so tones from black to white. Historically, in America anyway, I think many of us were in the thrall of the Magnum photographers and Cartier-Bresson in particular -- the snapshooters Winogrand, Friedlander, and Louis Faurer were not yet on my radar anyway. Magnum's success I guess came from the precedents set by Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post. Anybody in their fifties now will remember as if it were yesterday when they saw for the first time at age ten the Time/Life version of WWII. A soldiers body face down on the beach with his helmet awash in sand or a kid apparently your own age reduced to skin and bones at Auschwitz. That was photography right there in stark black and white. That was reportage; that was journalism. That was real life. That was then and this is now. For me now is color, and it started back in 1974.

WG: What got you onto the subject of photographing 42nd Street in New York? Why?
LC: Well, I'd done the Cars [series] and was still kind of fascinated by night color in the city. Every other day there was an article in the NY Times about the renovation of Times Square. Stories of how it was going to be cleaned up and spiffed up and how the steaminess was going to vanish. This was in 1979. I kept thinking of Robert Caro's The Power Broker about [the legendary New York City urban planner] Robert Moses. I was worried that the builder tycoons were going to ride roughshod over an area I found visually appealing. There is no stopping progress, though, especially in New York City. If you're a fan of Weegee, Atget, Evans, and Brassai, and on the other side of the lobby Edward Hopper, you know you have some sort of responsibility to make a record of things you love, and things that will disappear, and things you're reasonably sure people are walking by every day but not really seeing because they are worried about purse snatchers or worse.

WG: How did you take on a subject that physically ran on for, how many city blocks?
LC: It was the north side of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th [avenues]. I started with an 8x10 view camera at a minute- to two-minute exposures shooting from the Times Square island down the whole block with one horizontal. It was OK, but I knew there was more to this thing, so I developed a system of every so many feet with a measuring tape making a new shot, except when there was a movie marquee directly across which would get it's own shot. It was convoluted but I ended up with 22 vertical 8x10 negatives, which when they were sliced and diced properly (that has been done digitally now) made a fairly accurate map of that side of the street without cutting anything out. You could also see the architecture of the old theaters above the distractions of the street level.

WG: How did the final 15-foot long print happen?
LC: That's how long it is if you blow up to 16x20 prints. There is a contact print version about nine feet long. There is no reason why it couldn't be even bigger due to the large negative. Not many of us have that amount of space. A lobby maybe.

WG: Photographing at night in New York City at a time and place crime was rampant, did you ever have any problems?
LC: I had a small crew -- me and my friend Sam usually. I was up on a ladder with my Gitzo as high as it would go (to shoot over parked cars) and Sam was fielding questions from the denizens of the night. He'd gone to college on a football scholarship so nobody really wanted to mess with him.

WG: Anything funny or weird happen at night in New York City standing on top of a ladder under a cloth?
LC: There were plenty of zoned out types thinking we were from some TV station wanting their picture made or to be on the news. Sam would patiently explain that we were testing a new lens for the CIA and were actually shooting through to 43rd Street, or concoct some other smokescreen story. Amazingly in three months of shooting two or three nights a week not one cop ever asked what we were up to with all that gear. By contrast I was in that area during the Republican National Convention of 2004 and it was as though ants had put on blue uniforms. Of course by then 42nd Street had finally been turned into a tourist trap so there wasn't much point in going there anyway.

WG: Have you thought about going back and doing it again, a before-and-after?
LC: Sure. I regret that I didn't do the south side of that block. It came down to money. Hubert's Flea Circus was still there, and the New Amsterdam Theater, too. As a remedy I have threatened (to myself anyway) that I would do that side in some digital extravaganza.

WG: You seem to have gone off the course as an art photographer? What have you been doing?
LC: I don't know if "off course" is the way I'd put it, but life does have its twists and turns. Raising three kids takes more money than the photo art market was going to give me so I've spent 25 years working for shelter "rags" and doing coffee table books on subjects like Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg and cookbooks too. No regrets -- you do what you have to. Architecture, interiors, gardens, and food are where I spend most of my commercial time. My so-called personal work these days is mostly of the Mississippi delta where I live. Happily two of the kids are in college and there is some light at the end of that tunnel. And lord knows I love light.

WG: What are you working on these days?
LC: I shoot a lot of daily life around Mississippi. It's quirky, but so am I. Sometimes I go off for a day and shoot on old Highway 51 from Memphis to New Orleans (it actually goes all the way up to the Canadian border). It was the original north-south route in the state before it was overshadowed by Interstate 55, and it's the first road I was ever on here in 1970 back in the scary days when hippies like me weren't entirely welcome and "Okie From Muskogee" was on the radio. Now parts of the highway have atrophied and other parts prospered or reinvented themselves. Sometimes photos can show the before and after cheek by jowl.

WG: Is the 42nd Street Project print still available?
LC: Yeah. You want one? Prints of different sizes are available by calling me at 662.375.7277 or emailing me at oscura@bellsouth.net. It's also on view at 229 W. 42nd street on the tenth floor.

Photographer William Greiner is based in New Orleans, and his images from the city are on view at Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn through June 27.

For more details on panoramic photography see our Tips for Shooting Panoramas.