CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/27/2020

Pictures from after the world still made sense in 'Godlis Streets'

Featured photograph, captioned "Statue of Liberty, 1974," is reproduced from Godlis Streets, Reel Art Press's riveting new collection of 70s and 80s Boston and NYC street photography by David Godlis. Featuring texts by Godlis, Luc Sante and Chris Stein, this is seedy, stylish and celebratory old-school time travel at its best. "Godlis’s pictures show people uneasily enacting half-forgotten rituals, wearing vestigial dress-up clothes and timidly asserting spatial autonomy, in a city that seems to have been erected and abandoned by another, larger species," Sante writes. "Time moves haltingly, hesitantly, and seems to loop back on itself even as it draws inexorably toward death.… The subjects who notice his camera are wary at best, wondering whether he is a spy, or perhaps harvesting their souls, or maybe they wish he’d been there to take their pictures when they still looked good and the world made sense."