[audio:109012.mp3]
I’m standing on 8th Avenue and 30th. I always stop by here because it’s city side of New York. If you’ve seen the movie Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro, the movie starts off with him driving down 42nd Street when it was – you know, the prostitutes and the homeless and the criminals. Eighth Avenue in that area is kind of like that.

At night, around 8 o’clock to 10, you have the crack heads, you have the very ugly unattractive prostitutes, some are half men. I mean, some are men – I don’t know what the half of whatever they are. But anyway, I pretend I’m photographing a lingerie triple X store and as I walk by, I take their pictures.

There are always a lot of problems of me doing this but I act like a tourist and I get those crack heads, prostitutes and those people of the night. They’re very scary looking people and it is dangerous what I do but I really want to get that shot. I actually go a little too close and I just say, “Excuse me, excuse me.” But anyway, I get the shot.

Let me switch over to today right now. That was last night, September 11th. Now, it’s raining out and everyone has an umbrella. I love these pictures because when I photograph people, the light hits the inside of the umbrella and then it reflects down. It’s like studio lighting. Each person has their own individual studio lighting and sometimes their umbrellas are very colorful and I like those. You’ll see them sporadically through the website.

Anyway, I’m off tomorrow, got a lot of things to do, shopping, kids, school, baking lasagna, meatloaf, stuff for the week.