A nondescript locker in a Lower Manhattan storage center is a portal to a New York City still plagued by crack, AIDS and rampant crime.
A drug user squats for a fix in a squalid Manhattan heroin den. A man wearing a Savage Riders biker gang jacket holds a yawning baby. A child straddles a stripped bicycle on a trash-strewn street in Spanish Harlem.
Not everything is bleak. There’s a pig roasting on a spit in an abandoned Brooklyn lot. A smiling, bikini-clad bodybuilder flexes next to a Hasidic rabbi on a Queens beach.
These images and countless others are crammed into hundreds of boxes left behind by the heralded street photographer Arlene Gottfried, who trained her unflinching lens on New York’s less heralded neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s.
The archive, while valued in photography circles for both its artistic integrity and documentation of underrepresented neighborhoods, had remained in limbo and disarray since Ms. Gottfried’s death in 2017 at age 66 from complications from breast cancer.
But now, it seems, it is being saved.