Online News From The Tribeca Trib

Picturing the ’70s

by Barbara Aria

A man in a Richard Nixon mask tokes on a joint. A hooker in hot pants waits in a 42nd Street doorway. John Lennon and Yoko Ono perform naked in bed. A loft party. The Mudd Club. “New York in the 70s,” a new book by award-winning photojournalist and long-time Tribecan Allan Tannenbaum, is an ode to a legendary decade in the city’s cultural history.

As a young art school graduate turned aspiring photographer, Tannenbaum got his first job in 1973 with the Soho Weekly News and remained on staff until the paper folded nine years later. He photographed every one from the mayor to the homeless, but his main beat was the Downtown art and music scene.

Featuring some 400 black-and-white photos from Tannenbaum’s archive, “New York in the 70s” chronicles the anything-goes ethos of the era between Watergate and AIDS—a time of barely lost innocence when the city was broke, spaces were raw, rents were low and experimentation was a 24-hour passion.

“It was a feeling of freedom and excitement,” Tannenbaum remembers. Because the Soho Weekly News was ensconced in the Downtown world,

Tannenbaum had an insider’s eye as well as access to the era’s icons, including Warhol, Lennon and Ono, who wrote the book’s foreword.

The paper’s folding marked the end of the ’70s for Tannenbaum—and for Downtown. It coincided with the rise of corporate America and AIDS: Fear took the fun out of nightlife, money took over, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll were commodified.

Tannenbaum calls “New York in the 70s” “a remembrance of things past.” Life in the 1970s felt like a blur of Blakeian excess, and his book sets the decade in poignant focus.