SHATTERED - NEW YORKERS IN THE 70s

Joe Billera, Artist Statement: I have always been an observer of people. It's a skill I learned from my mother when I was a young boy. Wherever we went, she would subtly (or not so subtly) point out individuals in the continuous parade of humans crossing our path. She'd comment on their size, weight, dress, attitude and even give me a few psychological profiles as well. Yearly trips to Atlantic City and New York City proved particularly rich with her observations. As I got older and became interested in photography, I could hear her voice in the back of my head. It helped me cut through the crowds and focus in on certain individuals. The more I shot, the more intrigued I became. New York City, 1974-1980 If you want to find people with character, conflict, or extreme individuality, there's no better place than the NYC subway. It gave me the opportunity to capture the isolation of people even in a crowd. I looked for people who appeared to be lost in their own thoughts. It was a reflective moment that I found extremely powerful and revealing. I always traveled with my camera, a Leica M3 with a 35mm summicron lens. These were the days when everyone in the world was not a photographer. There were no mobile phones and no one had a camera in their pocket or their hand. So the record of what happened in those days is considerably less than the millions of images we see today. It's just one of the reasons I find these six years so exciting. Being a photographer was not a casual under