Langdon Clay (born 1949) recalls the drab and dusty mood in New York City at the end of the 1970s: the once-exciting political sea change wrought by the Vietnam War and the Haight-Ashbury drug experiments had given way to a sense of apathy, intensified by the aftermath of an oil crises and the omnipresent Cold War. The particular stretch of 42nd Street between 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue had now shifted from the glorious home of gilded movie palaces to the shadowy site of porn theaters which many saw as the area's ruin. Yet here, real estate moguls saw the potential to transform the heart of Manhattan into a mecca of tourism, framed by skyscrapers and shaped by commerce and fast pleasures. "It was with this coming change written on every wall that I sought to record for posterity that famous block between 7th and 8th Avenues," says Clay. "My only regret is that I didn't do the south side of the street." New York 42nd Street: North Side 1979/2011/2023 captures Clay's 1979 photos of a quintessential strip of 42nd street. More recent photographs from 2011 and 2023 show the striking contrast of its commercial renovation, turning this offshoot of Times Square into a Vegas-style Disneyfied hub for theater concoctions that we know today.
From 1974 to 1976, Langdon Clay (born 1949) photographed the cars he encountered while wandering the streets of New York City and nearby Hoboken, New Jersey, at night. Shot in Kodachrome with a Leica and deftly lit with then-new sodium vapor lights, the pictures feature a distinct array of makes and models set against the gritty details of their surrounding urban and architectural environments, and occasionally the ghostly presence of people.
“I experienced a conversion of sorts in making a switch from the ‘decisive moment’ of black and white to the marvel of color, a world I was waking up to every day,” Clay writes of this work. “At the time it seemed like an obvious and natural transition. What was less obvious was how to reflect my world of New York City in color … I discovered that night was its own color and I fell for it.”
Langdon Clay was born in New York City in 1949. He grew up in New Jersey and Vermont and attended school in New Hampshire and Boston. Clay moved to New York in 1971 and spent the next sixteen years photographing there, around the country and in Europe for various magazines and books. In 1987 he moved to Mississippi where he has since lived with his wife, photographer Maude Schuyler Clay, and their three children.
Langdon Clay: Cars