New York City isn't what it was in the 1980s. The streets were plagued with crime, the subway trains were coated in layers of graffiti, Times Square was a hub for porn and prostitution, thieves ran rampant, and taxi cab drivers witnessed it all. Matt Weber was one of those cabbies, and he decided to invest in a camera to document everything he saw during his shifts.
“Damn, I’ve got to buy a camera,” he said in 2017, thinking back on his days before his realization. “If you saw the movie Taxi Driver, that was the world that was out there. There were prostitutes on the corner, Times Square was crazy; it was a dangerous part of town. I was robbed in my taxicab at double gunpoint.”
He started photographing the city in 1978 and his black and white photos capture the soul of New York City culture over the span of decades – all the peep shows, the rundown cars enveloping the streets of Harlem, the sailors visiting adult entertainment theaters during Fleet Week, the drugs, the fist fights and even a man witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001.
His raw photos are compiled in a new book called Street Trip. Life in NYC, which is published by Carpet Bombing Culture. You can buy it on their website for £17.95 with free postage and packing in the U.K. It will also be available on Amazon for those in the U.S. starting on May 27.
