Rick McGinnis remembers his first trip to “Koch-era New York, the Manhattan of Bright Lights, Big City and Bonfire of the Vanities“:
I’d just read Winter’s Tale and New York felt like magic was hidden there, not in plain sight but just at the edge of my eye.
Looking at these [photos] for the first time in almost thirty years, that probably explains why I didn’t shoot the skyscrapers or the subway trains still covered in graffiti. I might have been — annoyingly — goggling at the endless canyon-like streets but I photographed the people, and while these shots won’t win any awards, they succeed for me as stills captured from my memories, still vivid three decades later, mostly because, even in spite of a little heartbreak, I was giddy with the sensation that life was finally underway.
