Longtime Village Voice photographer Sylvia Plachy looks back on 30 years of history in “It happened in New York: Photos by Sylvia Plachy.”
Photo courtesy of Sylvia Plachy/Brooklyn Public Library
What happened in New York between 1974 and 2004? What made it the city that it is today? Will history books ever say?
That’s what photojournalist Sylvia Plachy hopes to answer in a new retrospective exhibition called “It Happened in New York,” now on view at the Brooklyn Public Library’s central branch.
Plachy was a staff photographer for the Village Voice, where she penned her “Unguided Tour” column. For three decades, she collected rare stories from the streets of New York City.
“She is an incredible documentarian,” said the exhibit’s curator Cora Fisher. “Her work shows the life of the city, what Manhattan once was, the cultural capital of the work.”
On Feb. 1 at 6 p.m., Plachy will drop by the library to guide attendees through her work — which has appeared in far more than the Greenwich Village paper.
Her photos have also appeared in publications like The New York Times, New York Magazine and The New Yorker, and she has had solo shows in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, with similar showcases in Budapest, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, Manchester and more.
“It happened in New York” is made up of nearly 40 photos and clippings from the Village Voice as well as the six books Plachy has published.
“She is at the height of her everything,” Fisher told Brooklyn Paper. “All of the images are super relevant. She’s photographed homelessness, immigration issues, poverty, richness and culture.”
Many of the faces in the photographs will not go unrecognized.
“There is a portrait of Donald Trump causing a scene,” the curator said. “It was before his political life, when he was known as a real state mogul. He was surrounded by people asking for his autograph and Sylvia says that…
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