Carrie Boretz spent three decades photographing New York City at its most unguarded. Her photobook, STREET: New York City – 70s, 80s, 90s, is not a portrait of glamour. It’s a document of real people on real streets — vendors, commuters, teenagers, and neighbors — living through one of the most turbulent eras in the city’s history.
The New York subway system in the late 70s and 80s was a world of its own. Overcrowded, underfunded, and plastered in graffiti, the trains still carried millions of New Yorkers every day. Boretz rode those lines and turned her camera on the people around her — couples, commuters, strangers sharing tight spaces underground.
Above ground, the city in 1978 faced a brutal winter. A blizzard buried the streets under thick drifts of snow and ice. Cars were abandoned. Subway lines shut down. New Yorkers pushed through the aftermath on foot, navigating streets that had gone eerily quiet. Boretz was there, camera in hand.
The 70s and 80s brought rising crime and poverty to many neighborhoods. Storefronts were boarded up. Buildings sat abandoned. Graffiti covered nearly every surface, a direct expression of widespread frustration. Lower Manhattan street markets, like those on Orchard Street, remained a lifeline for working-class families stretching every dollar.
Yet New York’s extremes existed side by side. While homeless teenagers slept on West 42nd Street, Andy Warhol was photographed at Studio 54 just a dozen blocks north. Boretz captured both without flinching.
The city’s subway lines ran through every borough, connecting neighborhoods that felt like entirely different worlds. Queens, the Financial District, the Upper East Side — each had its own rhythm, its own faces.
By the early 90s, New York was slowly changing. Parks were being reclaimed. Playgrounds filled with children again. Formal luncheons returned to public gardens. The contrast with the previous decade was striking, and Boretz documented that shift just as closely as she had the harder years.
Downtown Manhattan’s financial corridors told their own story. The streets around Wall Street and Church and Chambers carried the weight of commerce, bureaucracy, and a city always moving forward — even when it was barely keeping pace.
