Matt Weber (Street photography), Men of New York, Portraits, The Urban Prisoner

Herman R.I.P. 1995

All Photos © Matt Weber

This is how I want to remember Herman Markowitz. Smiling and being a sweet old man. When he was released from the concentration camp, he weighed less than ninety pounds. As you can see he was well built. He said he was a talented wrestler, and he was very strong into his seventies. In 1956 he moved into a 3d floor studio apartment on West 86th Street. His rent was $56 per month! When he died in 2007, his rent had climbed to $218 per month. He spent his working years in a factory in Jersey working a lathe and stamping metal pieces for who knows what. He had one close call with falling in love back in the sixties, but it didn’t work out. I should have taped our conversations. The stories he told me about being stuck in a Nazi work camp during the war, will fuck me up till the day I die…

Matt Weber (Street photography), Cars & Buses, The Urban Prisoner, Urban Landscape

“Turbo Yuppies” 1988

I am using twenty year old titles because they had some relevance when I titled them and I suppose that the original impetus to title an image still has some significance, when looking at it many years later. After all, everything changes in New York, and the last yuppie was seen on September 10th 2001…After that we all became just New Yorkers again…

Right? Or is that just wishful thinking?

All Photos © Matt Weber