Richard Sandler

The image is walking down the steps
to the underground.

It waits on the platform
for the last train.

I am on the back platform,
in the middle of the street.

The city cups my eyes
with shadows.

Its image:

the steps to the underground—
the last platform
& train.

It’s time to continue our way.

***

“The day I started Photography I knew that I only wanted to shoot on the streets and in the subways.”

When underground, for Sandler, you cannot necessarily tell whether it is day or night.

And the street was never simply a genre.

From 1977 to 1992, he has said, it was “my muse, my shrink and my jones.”

It pokes and prods. It pulls and pushes.

Sandler began making photographs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1977.

Before photography there had been other lives: macrobiotic chef and acupuncturist; before those, in Sandler’s own telling, a pool hustler, teenage bookie and “tragically addicted gambler.”

Then came a Leica, access to a darkroom, and the convergence of circumstance that allowed an obsession to begin.

That summer, six months into making photographs, Sandler attended a three-day workshop with Garry Winogrand.

“I watched Winogrand like a hawk,” he later recalled.

Three days, Sandler said, were enough to teach him what he needed to know about shooting on the street.

What followed was not imitation but attention.

The street requires an attention to the brief window of Now.

New York is particularly suited to Sandler’s way of looking because New York refuses to remain still.

The canyon is made of concrete. Within it, bodies, faces and shadows move across sidewalks, avenues and underground—a subterranean stream of consciousness through time.

The subway had been part of Sandler’s life long before it became part of his photography. He rode it as a child. The incessant images were already there, happening every second.

Later, as a photographer, he recognized what it offered: strangers temporarily assembled inside a moving room, faces exposed between destinations. People still, in thought. Paused. Temporarily.

“Each subway car is a cast of different characters,” he has said.

The subway collapses the distance the street sometimes permits.

There is a temptation with street photography to talk endlessly about timing: the decisive moment, reflex, speed, luck.

Sandler talks instead about intuition.

People move. Cars move. Light changes. Faces disappear.

The photographer cannot arrange any of it.

The frame has to be discovered inside the disorder.

For Sandler, photographing the street became a way of eliminating the noise of everything outside the immediate moment.

The practice could be psychological, diaristic, even meditative.

At its best, perhaps for any photographer, a compelling image emerges. At its worst, it is still time spent paying attention.

Perhaps that is enough.

“You are recording your time,” Sandler has said.

The image hangs there.