Since the 80s, photographer Sally Davis has documented the city’s graffiti-soaked, neon-lit streets. Now she is stepping into the homes of the townspeople for the first time with her new book “New Yorker” (Ammonite Press), out April 1.
“I wonder who lived in these buildings, which I always photographed,” Davis (inset) told the Post. “I have decided… I will hit the streets after 35 years, and I will photograph New Yorkers in their apartments, in all their unusual, beautiful, weird, boring and authentic glory.”
There are 76 portraits and stories, artists, doctors, Broadway denizens, tattoo artists, and even avant-garde artists / musicians Laurie Anderson.
“Everyone in the book tells an eccentric and surprising story,” Davis said. But, like a city, it is everyone together that makes it special: “The whole is more than the sum of the parts.” Here are some of his fascinating topics.
Marina Press Granger
The 36-year-old Marina Press Granger left Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. His family settled in South Brooklyn and studied ballet for a decade. But today the art scene in the East Village is calling him that. Granger’s downtown apartment, shared with his fluffy pudgy, Odette, is beautiful in pink, but also a powerful statement of identity.
“I helped an elderly woman cross Dalency Street in Bowery,” she recalls in Davis’ book. “She asked me if I lived in the neighborhood and I said, ‘Oh no, I can’t stand.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘If you are here you will find a place here.” He was a game changer for me. Well, here I am and I found a place. . . Bazillars can buy all the real estate in Midtown that they want. Nobody wants to live there anyway! “
Rachid Alsataf
“I love the big city because I come from a small village,” Rachid Alsataf told Davis. “I love big buildings, I love noise, bars, restaurants, lights.” . “
The 75-year-old has done a lot with her life. One of nine siblings born in Raqqa, Syria, he has taught in elementary school, fought in a war, runs an electronics business and most recently, drives a taxi. Since 1994, the same modest East Village apartment has been his home.
“I like the diversity here. I don’t just live with the Arabic community – I live with the Chinese. . . With the Greeks. . . With Ukrainians! I like this!”
Sylvia parker mair
His father was a Motown musician. His mother was an Upper East Side classical pianist. And it seems that all the inherited calm is injected directly into Sylvia Parker Mair’s Brooklyn pad.
Ornamented in lush green plants and colorful portraits of far-flung places, the brown-stone 51-year-old painter and former model shares with her husband, Andre, sons Rio and Noah, and Golden Retrievers Milo and Bonnie.
She was drawn to art as a girl, appearing in church every day with her grandmother after falling in love with religious paintings.
As she recalls in the book: “My mother was asked, ‘Where are you from?” All the time because of his thick Argentine accent. She used to reply, ‘I am a New Yorker,’ even though she was not born here. If she had been a city, she would have been New York. When I miss him, I look at the horizon and feel it. “
Suzanne Malluk
Poised and bewildered with 60-year-old furry dog Bella, Suzanne Mallouk cuts a stunning figure in her tawny home along Central Park West. But the Canadian transplant once lived as a waitress in Kansas City for Max, a cigarette girl at the Ritz and a lover for artist Jean-Michel Basquette.
Together, Malouk and Basquiat lived on East 1st Street, a loft on Crosby Street, the Elgonkin Hotel and, before he gained fame, sometimes in the staircase of a friend’s building. Following Basquity’s death in 1988 at the age of 27, Malook studied in medical school and now works as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
“New York City is like a living organism, always growing and changing. It is a very lively city. The natural rhythm of the city is, according to me, synchronous or harmonious. “I feel sad elsewhere.”
Sam Swope and Jim Triforos
In 1994, Sam Swope, 67, and Jim Triforos, 65, were searching for an apartment. But when he came across two available studios in a brownstone on 90th Street in the Upper West Side, he decided to make it work. They live together, just on separate floors, ever since.
Swapple (in blue), from Pennsylvania, worked as a catering waiter and movie prop man, got teachers for the academy, a continuing education and resource program for city teachers. Tryforos (in gray) grew up in California and is a dancer-to-physiotherapist. He and Swag break away from New York’s “Starbucks mentality” and go underground.
“Unusual, unique, and the thrill of discovery is lost to the high end forever,” Triforce told Davis. “Soon, if the pot becomes legalized, all vice presidents will be knocked down and the NYC underbelly will be tragic [at risk of disappearing]”But he can’t imagine leaving:” The city still talks to me…. It provides a refuge of oblivion…. And possibly how to live without its luxurious and nurtured public transport system? “
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