AMY ARBUS – ON THE STREET 1980-1990

Posted on 2020-10-12

In 1980 when I started working for The Village Voice I didn’t think of myself as an artist, in part, because I was working for a newspaper. I also didn’t consider myself a journalist because I wasn’t covering the news. I was making photographic portraits for a style page called, “On the Street.” My page ran every six weeks with the tagline, “There are eight million fashions in the Naked City and Amy Arbus is going to photograph all of them… a few at a time.” It felt like a tremendous undertaking. After making these images for ten years, I realized that what I had created was a chronicle of a seminal time in New York City’s history.

The young people in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s didn’t have much money but they were tremendously creative and determined to succeed as artists. Among my subjects were musicians, clothing designers, performance artists, writers, and painters. They dressed to be noticed, as if it were their calling card. There was a palpable sense of romance about life and all it had to offer, an innocence the likes of which we have not seen since.

Amy Arbus

Opposite – The Clash, 1981

Exhibition runs through to November 22nd, 2020

Mitchell Giddings Fine Arts
183 Main Street
Brattleboro
VT 05301

mitchellgiddingsfinearts.com