During the winter it’s mostly people hurrying from point A to point B.” That’s why the summer is so much better, because people tend to hang out and things happen. A crazy looking person is ok, but I need things to be happening with more than one person, unless the person is doing something other than looking strange. “You can find them on 34th Street on many days, waiting for interesting people to appear. But perhaps it is Matt’s eye for the complex scene that really distinguishes his work. Looking at the photos today they might seem safe enough, but I can assure you if you were the one behind the camera in many of his shots you would be in a very real kind of danger. Weber’s work is the result of a perfect storm – being in NYC in the right era, having a camera, and having the will to get in there and shoot. It also, namely, takes guts! Even today, in 2021, I could find many “dangerously interesting” places to shoot in New York City, none of which I would actually go to. But it takes more than just access to capture work like Weber’s early street photos. Many of us would happily give our right arm, as the saying goes, to live in times with access to this kind of scene. Later, I bought a 200mm 2.8 lens, which helped a lot as I was stuck in my taxi and needed a telephoto much of the time.” The lens cost $99 and it was the best money I had ever spent, as I would take many of my best images with that lens. Less than a month later, in December, I walked into Competitive Camera, which was right across the street from Madison Square Garden, and I bought an AE-1 Canon with a 50mm 1.4 lens. I also saw a punk rocker having sex with his girl on the hood of a car in broad daylight, and my friend said, “Too bad you don’t have a camera!” In the fall of 1984 I was robbed at double gunpoint in my cab, and it was terrifying. A knife fight in Hell’s Kitchen, with the blades flickering in the dark streets, would be an example of a scene I only saw once. I kept muttering to myself, “If only I had a camera” after witnessing absurd things on the streets, which were perfect for a camera, if only I had one. I was only twenty-years-old and NYC at night was a crazy place. “I drove around at night in my cab when the city was just like Scorcese showed us in Taxi Driver. Weber was aware of his times in terms of his visually-rich surroundings, which led him to acquire a camera in 1984. In fact, New York City nearly declared bankruptcy in 1975. Both of these unique situations offered up great photographic opportunities – New York City in the 70s and 80s was a place almost unimaginable to anyone who was not there – dangerous, dilapidated, and destitute. In the early 80s, barely in his twenties, he drove a NYC “yellow” cab. Matt Weber came of age in New York City in the 1970s. In Conversation with Street Photographer Matt Weber
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