“The Last Days of the Bowery” 1986

I have mixed emotions about this picture. He came up to my cab looking for some money, which he got, but I felt compelled to take a picture of a man who had lost everything. I know he may have had a rough childhood and taken to the bottle at an early age, but I also can’t help but wonder if he had served his country many years earlier. If he was 60 when I took this picture, he would have been 18 in 1944. He could have seen things no one should have  in Europe or the South Pacific, and he certainly could have been old enough to have served in Korea. I realize it’s total conjecture, but I think many of the poor men who ended up on the Bowery, were at one point soldiers…