August 1 – September 7 by appointment only

Like the streets he has been photographing for 30 years, Richard Sandler’s photographs are blunt and to the point and lyrical and poetic. The product of a daily wandering through the streets of New York for so many years, his work simultaneously documents, transforms, celebrates, and criticizes the city’s street level vibrancy. Emphasizing Sandler’s photographs from the 1980s, the exhibit looks back on a city that was still rebounding from the brink of collapse and in still resonated the extraordinary explosion of creativity in art and life of that period.

In 1992 Sandler expanded his work into video, first making “The Gods of Times Square,” (1999) a prize-winning documentation of the street religious life at one of the city’s traditional centers of energy. As part of the Phatory exhibition, there will be a continuous projection of a second video, “Brave New York” (2004), which chronicles 12 years of the Lower East Side’s change and honors those who have struggled to retain the neighborhood’s original character in the face of rampant gentrification.

Whitmanesque in its scope, Sandler’s photographs and videos are marked by an intense involvement in that neighborhood and the city as a whole and a deep acceptance of its many perspectives. He writes of the photographic tradition of which he is a part: street photographers are the eyes of the city. We wander around town in all weather and seasons looking for light, courting chance. We take the pulse of the times, feasting on humorous juxtapositions and stark contrasts. We are a complex mix of amateur anthropologist, historian, diarist and athlete.

Sandler studied briefly with New York street photographer Gary Winogrand. His work is included in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the New York Public Library and he has received two photography fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His video work has won awards at Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Popcorn Film Festival (Stockholm, Sweden, 1999) the Digital Talkies Video Festival (New Delhi, India), and the Dahlonega, Georgia Film Festival. He has taught street photography and photojournalism at the International Center of Photography, Parson’s School of Design, and the Catskill Center of Photography. He curated the group exhibition Living for the City: 20 Years of New York Street Photography at the Parsons School of Design in 1997.