Broome Street 1980 – © Brian Rose / Edward Fausty

I have now completed phase one of rescanning the images from the Lower East Side project. The 1980 pictures – about 500 of them – have all been digitized at high resolution. Ed Fausty and I did these pictures over the course of a year just after graduating from Cooper Union.

Photography can seem like such a solitary and personal pursuit that it may be hard to imagine collaborating with someone else as we did back in 1980. But working with a view camera on a tripod calls for a more deliberate approach. We walked, talked, pointed, gestured, set up the tripod, peered at the ground glass beneath a dark cloth, and arrived, often quickly, at a visual consensus. We did not argue, as I recall.

When I first scanned these images back in the mid-2000s, I shuffled through the 4×5 sheets of film and picked out what I thought were the strongest. Our contact prints from back in the day were hastily made and hard to use for critical assessment. Many were missing. I initially tried making traditional analog prints from the negatives but discovered that the film had badly shifted out of balance. Scanning and color-correcting was the only way to recover the original balance, a painstaking process that sometimes required a couple of hours for a single image.

The photograph above is one of many that I somehow missed the first time around.