CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/9/2019

Long lost NYC photos by Magnum master, Bruce Gilden

"To make a long story short, I’m not a very organized person and when I moved from the loft where I had been living for thirty-five years in New York City, I piled up thousands of negatives in cardboard boxes and never opened them for three years. Last year in the summer, I was home with someone who worked for me and in a cleaning frenzy, we started looking at all the old New York prints that I had in my studio in Beacon where I live now. I remembered some of them and others not, so I decided to go through my old negatives and contact sheets. I spent practically the whole summer of 2018 looking through more than two thousand rolls. It was an anthropologist’s job and when I discovered these images, I was very surprised because I didn’t think that I had anything on these rolls. There are no clinkers. When I say 'clinkers' I’m being hard on myself. So I mean that there are very few mediocre pictures: I’ve looked at them numerous times now and they’re good through and through. I had found a gold mine!
Right away I thought this is going to be a fantastic New York book! It’s even tighter than my two other books and there will hardly be any flash photos in this book. So what was interesting about the whole story is that it felt like I had created a whole new body of work, and if I had died this work would never have seen the light of day. Nobody has my eye or my patience to go through it all, so it would have been lost forever. And that’s why we gave it the title of Lost and Found. — Bruce Gilden