A window on the world and a world in itself. The taxi that Joseph Rodríguez drove for ten years, from 1977 to 1987, offered him a unique point of view on the city of New York and its inhabitants, its chic avenues as well as its slums, its businessmen, its models, its families, its prostitutes and its homeless people. It was thanks to his yellow rental car that the American paid for his photography studies, but also that he produced his first series, before moving on to a long career mainly focused on marginalized communities: Latinos in the Harlem neighborhood, Los Angeles gangs or incarcerated young delinquents – series currently on display as part of a retrospective at the Fotomuseum in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Raised in a dysfunctional Brooklyn family that he only wanted to escape, Joseph Rodríguez, now 73 years old, himself experienced the streets, drugs and prison. The period when he starts driving a taxi is a turning point for him: after a stay behind bars, he decides to break away from his bad friends, get rid of his heroin addiction and resume his studies.
From 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., in this New York of the 1970s and 1980s still weighed down by the economic crisis, crime and racial tensions, he drives. And collects, from this little yellow bubble, the joys and sorrows of inhabitants of all social classes. “A taxi becomes the place to listen to stories. And also the psychiatrist’s office. People have so much to tell,” he writes in Taxi : Journey Through my Windows, 1977-1987 (powerHouse Books, 2020, untranslated).
15e Street, 4:30 a.m.
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