Matt Weber (Street photography), PROTESTS, signs

“Semper Fi” 1988

Somewhere in Brooklyn I found this dilapidated billboard and I guess you could say that this was taken in “Peacetime”…The cold war was on the verge of ending and it had been quite some time since the troops left Vietnam…Just three years later George Bush the first would start the last conventional war in this country’s history. Unfortunately the end of war as it had been known for ages, would not be the end of war…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Urban Landscape

NYC 1999

Most of the 1990s were pretty lame years for me photographically. I struggled to take any images which made me feel like I was on a path that would lead anywhere. I was still shooting with a 50mm lens and thus I was always slightly detached from my subjects. Sometimes you have to really get stuck in order to move at all. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a bad stretch that seemed to last forever, but for me it was like “writer’s block” with a camera…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), The Urban Prisoner, Urban Landscape

“Incoming” 1989

When I took this picture and named it “Incoming” for obvious reasons, I never expected it to become prophetic. If I do an exhibit, the temptation to place this image before the pictures I took on 9/11 is fairly strong. I don’t know if I want to post my pictures of the massacre. I realize that they are the most historically significant pictures I am likely to take. There’s something very strange about fielding compliments about pictures that had such terrible content. I have had to print certain images from that day, and stuck alone in my darkroom, I sometimes get overwhelmed.

I lost a close friend because of September 11th. He thought that we got what we deserved that day. I am well aware of our country’s past and I am very ashamed of certain parts of our history, but…

September 11th was not a MILITARY battle ending in victory for the demented “jihaders”, it was a fuckin’ massacre, plain and simple…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), homeless, The Urban Prisoner

Shadowman 1989

Probably one of the best examples I could ever come up with, to prove that life, can provide the most amazing things to photograph. I was barely awake at 5 am after a long shift in my taxi, when I spotted this guy playing with his shadows. In a million years I would never expect to have seen this guy with the two fat black stripes on his back, doing this between two fat black stripes on a wall in lower Manhattan…I don’t mean that I could never conjure up something good on my own, but the happenstance of life has a way of providing gifts when you least expect it…

All Photos © Matt Weber