Langdon Clay Boeken

42nd Street, 1979 contains Langdon Clay’s 1979 photos of a quintessential strip of 42nd Street near New York’s Times Square, showing its gritty neon charm before it became the more Disney/Las Vegas hub for theater concoctions that we know today. Clay 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 experiment had given way to a sense of apathy, intensified by the aftermath of an oil crisis and the lingering Cold War. The particular stretch of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues had now shifted from the glorious home of gilded movie palaces of the 1940s to the shadowy site of porn theaters which many saw as the area’s ruin. Yet here real-estate moguls saw potential to transform this 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.”

Cars were an indispensible aspect of twentieth-century culture, both for their utility and aesthetics. From 1974 to 1976, Langdon Clay 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.