Times Square

This was then:

Times Square, 1980. Photo by Bruce Barone.

Christopher Reeve in Lanford Wilson's "Fifth of July."

Luc Sante writes:

Bruce Barone’s photographs are among other things annals of a former world, one which was documented so fleetingly and obscurely that I sometimes have felt as if it existed only in my imagination. More than once I’ve needed visual evidence of that world and could not lay my hands on any. It seemed to have disappeared, that time that now seems notional even when you are confronted with hard evidence of its existence. It was one of those points of overlap, a purgatorial era--stuck between past and future, between living and dead--a time-slip. American cities in the 1970s and early 1980s were restless ghosts, unable to believe they were no longer alive. They trailed their bricks and stamped tin and terra cotta like winding sheets. They were so dead that for a while it almost seemed as if the poor had been put in charge.
            Barone, unlike many photographers of the time, was not trying to make pictures of what he wished existed, or of what happened in protected spaces behind closed doors, but recorded what actually transpired when he walked down the street.......

~from Famous People, Famous Places;
Forgotten Images of a Lost Times Square.
Photographs by Bruce Barone.
To be published as a Blurb book.


What does this photograph mean to you? I would love to hear from you!