1992

It was December 1992. I was living on the upper east side of Manhattan and working in film production at Murray Bruce Productions in the far west village (aka the Meatpacking District, back when it actually had meat packers). I’d moved to New York City two years prior and in those two years, the city had seeped into my bones and captured my imagination at every turn. I now counted myself a New Yorker.

Living in my first apartment post-college, the prior two years I'd started receiving holiday cards from friends and family. At that time, pre-internet and pre-computers, you mainly received store-bought cards and the occasional hand-made ones. (The modern-day digitally printed cards with photos that we all receive today only happened with the advent of the internet and digital photography. This is long before then!) And so in 1992, I decided I wanted to send out a card of my own. Only I didn't want to send a store-bought one. I was inspired to make a holiday card with artistic aspirations of the city as my canvas.

At the time in the city, the MTA had been on a mission to eliminate all its graffiti-covered subway cars and the last one was removed from service in 1989. Once subway cars became off-limits, more graffiti appeared on the streets of New York. Graffiti was controversial - was it defacement or was it art? (or both?) On one hand, it was associated with crime and gangs. Landlords who had their buildings tagged were understandably not happy about it. On the other hand, artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat had used the streets to create iconic art. In addition, elaborate, beautiful and thoughtful murals serving as neighborhood memorials, would often pop up on building walls after someone died. And then there was Cost and Revs. They were anonymous taggers (Revs has still not revealed his identity to this day). Their names could be seen all over the most improbable places in New York City - high up on bridges or roofs or sides of buildings and you couldn’t imagine how they got up there and how they did not get caught. It became a game to walk around the city and spot their tags.

One December afternoon, with all of that swirling in the background, I had an idea. I called my friend and photographer Geoffrey Croft and asked him to meet me in Central Park with his camera. I stopped off at Lee's Art Shop on 57th Street and bought a can of spray snow. We scouted Central Park and found this stone bridge which seemed perfect for my fake graffiti scene. That’s Geoff's leather jacket I put on, my own skull cap (which was my hat of choice at the time) and voila, we made this photo. It captured my love of the city and planted me firmly within it.

Once we shot the photo, I rented a darkroom by the hour to make the prints. As a kid, I’d learned to print photos myself so I resurrected that knowledge lodged somewhere deep in my brain, fumbled my way through remembering how to make prints again (developer, stopper, fixer!) and sent these cards out.

Unbeknownst to us, it was the start of a yearly tradition and yearly collaboration with Geoffrey (he may rue the day he said yes back in 1992!).