30 For 30: Face of a Changing City
To celebrate Women’s History Month, we’re featuring items from the PWP Archives* each day on this blog. In looking back, we see not only where we started, but how far photography, women, and the world have come since 1975.
Catalog for the 1997 PWP exhibition “All Americans”
In PWP exhibition catalogs are glimpses of a changing city. When the group was founded in 1975, New York was halfway through its darkest decade. Crime was high, bankruptcy loomed, infrastructure was in ruins. Gritty black-and-white images from early PWP shows reflect the on-going drama of the street where a wild, circus-like atmosphere prevailed. As the city became safer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, investment flowed to it and gleaming towers rose. Times Square, once Dionysian, morphed into a Disneyesque theme park, and the outsize characters who treated New York as their personal stage were swept away by waves of gentrification. To the sorrow of many street photographers, a special edge and zest were lost.
Images © NY photographer Darleen Rubin
Some of the places where PWP met–Nikon House in Rockefeller Center and the Photo District Gallery on West 20th Street–no longer exist, and the Photo District has all but disappeared as equipment sales continue to move online, and digital work flow replaces film processing. It is new world and different field, the only constant: constant change. Remember how dominant Eastman Kodak used to be?
1989 Letter from Kodak confirming meeting space for PWP
Brochure for the 1997 Exhibition “All Americans”
– Catherine Kirkpatrick
*The PWP Archives were acquired by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library of Emory University
Links to all the 30 For 30 Women’s History Month blogs:
Help Me Please! Hopelessly Waiting…
Exhibition and Anger
Spreading the Word
Early Ads On Paper
Cards and Letters
A Lady, a Truck, a Singing Dog
Women of Vision
A Show of Their Own
Taking It To the Street
Sisters of Sister Cities
Sold!
Education and More
Face of a Changing City
Digital Enabling
Expanding Walls and Other Possibilities
A Wonderful Life–Lady Style
Branding–the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Great Change Sweeps In
PWP Goes Live!
Honoring the Upcoming
Continuity Through Change
Reaching Out
Eye a Woman Naked
Rapidly Multiplying Alternative Options
Women In the World, As Themselves
Kudos!
Friends Who Overcame and Inspired
Reversing the Gaze
Photography and More
Chicks Telling It Like It Is
Looking Back With Thanks