Syracuse 1981

Bruce Gilden is a New York street photographer who's come to be associated with highly unflattering close-up portraits. Not so much warts and all as warts and not much else. I featured him last year with some of his State Fair pictures. Recently he rediscovered some of his earlier photos from 1981, taken in Syracuse, NY. They've now been been put together for a new limited edition publication. They're interesting because they show his early skill at picking out the ugly and unusual in the everyday, without tipping over – as his later work so often seems to – into a parade of grotesques.