He's got some fantastic 1980s street portraits, mostly taken in Hell's Kitchen, including lots of tough kids, biker guys, and a group shot of hippies with one girl in a t-shirt that says: "Born on a mountain, raised in a cave, truckin' 'n fuckin' is all I crave." She'd just come in on the train from Long Island.
A set of black-and-white shots lends a noirish air to the city, a world of topless dance parlors and crumbling movie palaces.
Carl says, "These day's I'm not doing as much work on the street as before--I used to get up early in the morning and lug my 4x5 Deardorff around New York, looking for good stuff. The change is astonishing, and I now think that I've put together a small historical archive of the city."
His Broadway and Beyond set shows several scenes of Times Square in full color in the 1980s.
Said Carl, "New York is certainly a more civilized place these days, but, visually, during the 70s and 80s--periods of economic difficulty--it was much more exciting. The whole theater district was beautiful in its decline. It was seedy and had a melancholy beauty that has largely disappeared. I'm glad that I had the energy to get up early and shoot."
This shot's got it all--adult bookstore, Nedick's, a bank of phone booths--everything vanished:
Carl says he's interested in re-shooting some of the sites he documented in the 1980s. "I've more or less abandoned film these days, except for my Fuji 6x17. But when I look at the prints made from large and medium-format film, I'm thrilled by their beauty. It's like the difference between the sound on LPs and CDs."
I sure miss the Old New York too.
For more:Carl Burton flickr album
Thanks to: Jeremiah's Vanishing New York