Reuben Radding is a Brooklyn-based photographer who has been eloquently capturing the heart and soul of the people of New York City through his images for a number of years. Like the best of street photography, there is a poetic warmth imbued in his shots which reveal the complex depth of his subjects within the confines of a hectic city. Radding calls his work "an improvisation, performed in long hours of wandering the New York City streets on foot, guided by the scent of great human character and fragility, poetic physical gestures of emotion or energy, explosions of life force, and human interactions which imply uncertain stories when stopped in time."
Radding's artistic quest began with music, having played in punk bands (notably Dain Bramage with Dave Grohl while still in DC) and many jazz ensembles since he moved to New York City in 1988. Later in life he turned to photography and recently focused his lens on life in the Big Apple during two very different, yet related pivotal moments in the city’s history — the Coronavirus pandemic (and subsequent shutdown) and the Black Lives Matter protests that kicked off across the five boroughs. Those protests led to a different sort of shutdown with a five-night citywide curfew, imposed by NYC mayor Bill de Blasio and enforced by an overzealous and seemingly out-of-control NYPD. We are fortunate to have Reuben's stunning work to help document this turbulent time.
Where did you grow up and when and why did you move to New York City?
I was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up across the river in Arlington, Virginia. It always felt like a somewhat characterless place to be and to be from. I played in punk or “new wave” bands from the time I was 15, and D.C. was definitely a place with a vibrant scene for that, but otherwise it was really limited. I left for New York City in 1988 to surround myself with serious artists and I never looked back. I had already been coming up for visits for the year and a half before that with my partner at the time, and we had become friends with Lydia Lunch. She encouraged us to move here, and we took the risk. It felt like a really big deal to come here back then. I was only 21 years old!
The city was an even more vivid version of itself then. Neighborhoods really had identities in a way that’s fading now. Every day walking out my door felt like I was in a movie. I had never felt that in Virginia for even a moment.
What sparked your interest in photography, and what drew you specifically to street photography?
From the day I arrived in NYC I would constantly see things that just
astonished me, that would make me say “what the FUCK was THAT?” and then later, when I would try to describe those peculiar moments, words just didn’t seem to convey the bewildering experience of just seeing it. After a couple decades of hearing myself say, “god, I wish I had a camera!” I finally bought one. This was right before cellphone cameras became a really viable option. That’s probably a good thing, cause an iPhone would probably have pacified me for a long while. Or who knows? Maybe it would have been just as good a way in. I’ve had students who only shot with the phone, and they did great work.
Anyway, the interest in street photography was just an interest in the street and the complexities of people. I didn’t know it was a “genre.” I just wanted to make pictures of what I loved, which was unposed human life. My automatic relationship to the camera was to take it in the world and try to find candid images of people, as if I wasn’t there. I never considered any other kinds of photography until I was already working in the street, and then it was out of a desire to become more skilled or to make a buck. Eventually I did educate myself on the history of public photography, but like most artists, the desires in me came first, and then I sought out the fellows and heroes. After I’d been at it a little while I saw an article online about Henri Cartier-Bresson that called him a icon of street photography, and I thought, “huh...that sounds like what I do…”
Are you self-taught or trained? Do you have any photographers that are an inspiration or influence on your work?
I would say I’m mostly self-taught when it comes to technique. Early on I took a couple workshops at the 92nd Street Y and the International Center for Photography, and then a few private ones with some great mentors. Recently I got an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, but there were no photographers on faculty. At least nobody whose primary practice was photography. They pretty much let me do what I wanted, which was to continue shooting the streets, but also to expand my work to include every area of my life. This was partly to make new discoveries and open my mind to the idea that my kind of pictures might be found anywhere, but also because it had been my lifelong dream––like since I was 10––to live the artist life 24/7, and photography is a medium which lends itself very well to this way of living. You can do it pretty much anywhere, anytime. In my years of primarily living as a musician it seemed like a lot of my time was spent waiting to get the right people together, waiting to have a gig or the right space to practice in, waiting for the opening band to finish...but there’s always the chance that wherever I am there might be a picture there for me. It’s made me a much more patient person, and more content to do “normal life” things, because I might get to photograph.
I think a lot of my early photo influences were things I loved before I ever thought about photography. Like, one of my favorites even today is Anders Petersen. I first saw his work on the cover of Tom Waits’ LP, Rain Dogs, in 1985. For years I didn’t know much about the picture or where it was taken, but I used to stare at it for long periods and wish I could be in the place where it was taken. It just looked like a vivid life to live. I didn’t know it was in Hamburg. I didn’t know it was from the book Cafe Lehmitz. I didn’t know anything about Anders Petersen. But pictures like that were my food. As a teen I didn’t have a lot of money for records, so every time I got a new one I would spend a lot of time looking at the covers and reading the credits and liner notes. I absorbed rock and jazz photography deeply, and this probably had a bigger effect on my aesthetics than any specific artist after I got into photography myself. So in a way some of my biggest visual influences are people whose names I wouldn’t know till later, like Anton Corbijn, Penny Smith, Lynn Goldsmith, Jim Marshall, Julia Gorton, Lee Friedlander, and many others.
Does your background in music relate in any way to how you approach photography?
Besides those early influences, yes, both in the making of pictures and in navigating the photo scene. Everything I experienced in all my years in music transfers over in a very direct way. It’s incredibly clarifying when faced with a problem to not only see the same issues I feel like I’ve already solved, there’s also something about seeing the solution in two different “worlds” that makes it all the more grounding and reassuring and makes me think I can follow my own path. Musicality is a central metaphor for how I evaluate pictures. I’m more interested in their tones and expressive qualities than some allegiance to truth or informational functions.
During the shutdown in NYC you took to the streets, documenting life in the pandemic. Did this time open your eyes to anything new about the city?
It would make sense that spending as much time as I do walking around would make me some kind of expert on the city, but mostly it makes me an expert on myself. I’m a basketcase without daily practice. I need to be photographing, and since all my paying photo “work” evaporated right at the beginning of the crisis, I didn’t really have anything else asking for my time. It’s true that during the early days of Covid-19 I noticed things I hadn’t before, or learned to appreciate different parts of the city. Mostly I just felt compelled to be out, to be experiencing this city that I’ve loved for many years while it went through this surreal shakeup. I mean, I’ve lived with NYC’s ups and downs for over 30 years. It would have been unthinkable to me to stay inside and not see for myself what the reality was, as opposed to the unreality of being online and stuck at home, getting more and more afraid and anxious. I didn’t take a single day off of shooting for the first 6 weeks of the crisis, and it was an incredible experience. Sometimes it was unsettling or frustrating, but every day I would see something that impressed or amazed me, and sort of made everything a little more “right sized.” By the time I came hone, whether I was out for 30 minutes or seven hours, I felt hopeful. Then I would get up the next day and be anxiety-ridden again, and have to go at it some more.
In the midst of the shutdown, protests broke out nationwide in response to the police murder of George Floyd. It seems you shifted your focus to documenting the uprising. What has that been like? Are there any lessons or stories you'd like to share from your experiences?
I don’t have any lessons to offer. It’s been an amazing thing to be present for and I hope it leads to some major changes in our society. Before this all happened one of my lingering fears was that as a populace we were facing a real dilemma between the need for public protest and the need to follow new rules and guidelines for public health. I was worried the powers that be would use our fears of the pandemic to limit our dissent and that we would become complicit. But it turns out the people made the choice to stand up. And the most impressive thing to me was when de Blasio instituted the 8pm curfew, it was like a challenge. People felt like they had to defy it. That was personally inspiring to me. It's incredible timing that the murder of George Floyd happened at a time when 30 million people were out of work. It's probably a big aid to people's availability and willingness to protest.
You published two issues of your Corona Diary zine. Can you tell us a bit about it, and will you follow up with a publication focusing on the protests?
I started publishing zines last year with the title OFF TOPIC. It was a fun way to offer something to people who like what I do who don’t necessarily have the means or motivation to buy one of my photos as a print. I had been doing daily posts on social media I called Corona Diary, of sets of photos made that day or the day before and it made sense to kind of mark the first few weeks of it all with a thing. A lot was still changing every day and the pictures seemed to form a strange visual chronology of the whole situation, and my internal state as well. I also had no other way to make money! So, I made the first Corona Diary zine and while I was working on it I applied for a grant towards zines with Covid-related content from Broken Pencil in Toronto. I did get the grant, but it came through well after Corona Diary was all sold out, and it felt like I should use the money to make a second zine.
It’s been very strange for me to work within a context. Most of my work up till now has resisted theme, or story. I’m really more interested in being outside the context of reportage or narrative. But the pandemic put everything I looked at into a specific kind of framing. For those first few weeks especially, everything looked disproportionally interesting to me. People in masks were interesting, but then people who didn’t wear them were super interesting. A lot of people were photographing but it felt to me like most fo them were shooting the story we all thought we knew already, like empty streets and E.R. entrances. I think there are always other stories besides the ones we think of ahead of time. Things we don’t know until we see them. And for me there’s as much value in a poem as a story. So maybe Corona Diary was just a daily attempt to write those poems, and the zines are like chapbooks. Time will tell. It felt right to call it a diary because it made me feel free to include things that weren’t overtly Covid-related, and relieved me of the responsibility to “document.” It was as much about my feelings as anything else, and it seems like some people relate to what I’ve expressed. Still, I prefer not to act as a documentarian, because telling a story usually requires including weaker photos in order to convey important information, and I would prefer my selections to be a stream-of-consciousness that make their own unique story, using only the images that feel the strongest. To me it’s a more vital use of the medium, and more true to my own passions.
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All photography by Reuben Radding © 2020
Interview conducted by Lee Greenfeld © 2020
