Matt Weber (Street photography), Color, Coney Island, signs, Women of New York

“Jesus Freak” 2010

I don’t know where to start. It’s 5/21/11 and supposedly the world is about to end. I’ve heard first hand from one of these lunatics that there’s only room for 200,000,000 souls in heaven. That’s like 3% of the people on earth. Talking to this lost soul for a few minutes, I heard the standard rhetoric: We are all sinners and must repent or burn forever. I asked her if the cigarette lighter I stole from Woolworth’s was a big enough sin to be burned, and she said, yes! I asked if “God doesn’t recognize the difference between stealing a 19¢ lighter when I was ten, and maybe stealing billions of dollars like Bernie Madoff?” She said no…All sins are sins and must be repented for. God doesn’t play favorites between those who are starving and steal an apple, and those who are filthy rich and steal someone’s life savings! OK, I walk away as usual, unable to make a single point as she kept shouting how I was going to burn…She is probably praying up real good right now and when the world doesn’t end, I wonder if she’ll feel any relief, or disappointment that she didn’t get to meet Jesus. I think that this Mr. Camping schmuck is really evil and shouldn’t have been given the time of day by the press. Of course he spent over 100 million dollars spreading his doomsday message. Money talks and you know what walks. I feel bad for the millions of people who have actually been preparing for the end and feeling extremely scared for the past week or so. I’ve been at gunpoint several times and know how frightening it can be. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Men of New York, Old New York, Times Square

“Unknown Photographer” Times Square 1988

You can see the Nathan’s on West 43d St. which had the venerable Times Square Bowling Alley upstairs. I bowled there a few times for 75¢ a game back in the late 1970s. Nathan’s french fries as we all know are just dripping in their grease which may be days if not weeks old. The Big Apple Porn theater would let you stay all day for $2.99 or as long as four flicks lasted…Who is this photographer? I don’t think it’s Eli Reed. Could it be Chester Higgins? I think he has one of those Quantum battery packs on his belt, which leads me to believe he was a press photographer…Oh well, he’s old school and was working the area at its seediest…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Old New York, Women of New York

“Harry’s Burritos” 1988

I finally found this negative which I misplaced many years ago. Her name is Phoebe and I was told she is a fairly well known actress. I never shoot celebs and I didn’t know who she was. To tell the truth, I handed my camera to my pal who was riding shotgun because I didn’t want to crawl onto his lap to take the picture. So I developed the film and printed the picture, and then lost the negative twenty three years ago! Here’s a fresh scan of an image I never thought would resurface…

© Matt Weber???

Matt Weber (Street photography), America, Urban Landscape

“On The Road”

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey
and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the
people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the
children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and
shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens
all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides
the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found,
I think of Dean Moriarty… ©Jack Kerouac