In 1975, I moved from Boston to New York City, where I opened a bookstore on the Upper West Side with my sister and her then-husband. It was a big responsibility, and it took up a lot of my time, but I met many people, most of whom were aspiring to be someone else: waiters becoming actors, clerks becoming writers, salespeople becoming artists, all of them swirling around in the mess, trying to survive.

New York then was a huge melting pot of cultures. I photographed in Chinatown and Little Italy, at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and in Central Park, which was teeming with life. There were buskers, protesters, politicians, and plenty of cops everywhere. In 1980, the Democratic National Convention was held there.

After I left the bookshop, I kind of floundered around and worked in a few commercial studios, but they didn’t pay anything. I did it just for the experience. I worked the graveyard shift in a photography lab making internegatives, converting positive slides into negative film, and in another lab as a stripper, someone who used red tape to mask imperfections on negatives before they were printed. I had a few shows and a few pieces published. I even worked for the World Olympic Committee, taking pictures of “Sam the Eagle,” who was the mascot of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. See the photograph “Sam Ronald Ueberroth.” Yet what attracted me most was photographing people on the streets when they didn’t know they were being photographed, in the midst of the moment. That is what I found particularly fascinating. In those days, I had no problem sticking my camera in their faces to get the shot I wanted. I photographed people I knew, as in “Addis” and “Balthime 5,” but most of the others were people on the street, and the photographs were all candid, caught-in-the-moment images. I shot a lot of models, as in the photographs “Mysterious” and “Shelly,” but I didn’t get the same satisfaction from that as I did from roaming the streets.

I stayed in NYC until the end of 1980, and one of my last memories was the night of December 8, 1980, when we learned of John Lennon’s death. It was sobering news, and I was devastated. We couldn’t believe it. The outpouring of grief was evident in the number of people who showed up outside the Dakota, the apartment building where John and Yoko lived, as seen in the photographs “Thank You John,” “Imagine,” and “The Dream Is Over.” I can think of no better words to express the way I feel about the body of work I have amassed than to quote from John Lennon’s song “In My Life.”

“There are places I remember

All my life, though some have changed

Some forever not for better

Some have gone and some remain

All these places had their moments

With lovers and friends, I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I’ve loved them all”