Carriage—to-Pumpkin: New York City Street Scenes early Sunday morning

In the wee hours of Sunday, when night turns into day, you can meet funny and unusual characters on the streets of Manhattan. Partygoers from nightclubs, office plankton, prostitutes, scavengers, security guards and drunks fall into the first rays of the sun on the way to their business. Intrigued by the possibilities offered by the ever-changing life in New York, photographer Richard Renaldi began setting an alarm for three or four in the morning, pulling himself out of bed before dark to shoot perfect strangers on an 8x10 camera.

Thus was born the Manhattan Sunday photo project ("Sunday in Manhattan") — a collection of black-and-white portraits, urban landscapes and still lifes, in which the predawn hour is captured. These photographs are now on display at the Eastman Museum Gallery in Rochester, New York. The exhibition will last until June 11, 2017. The photographer told Dazed magazine a little about his work and about New York, which few people know.

(12 photos in total)

I've been hanging out in New York since the mid-1980s, often leaving clubs after dawn and finding the city in its quietest and calmest state, often being in a changed state myself. The soft morning light, which is getting sharper by the minute, carries an element of photographicity. There is a feeling that something may happen now. The potential that a nightclub gives in terms of flirting and dating strangers is transferred to the streets. The city is suspiciously empty and calm — a perfect contrast to the sweaty disco crowd.

I was attracted to people who radiated confidence and comfort when they became someone from their own imagination. I was attracted to people making their dreams come true when nightlife was somehow connected to their sense of identity. I was attracted to people who were part of New York's nightlife culture. At the same time, I have never tried to somehow catalog the characters of the modern night party, although some of the characters in Manhattan Sunday are notable figures and important people in nightlife.

Before this project, I always signed names and dates on my photos. I wanted them to relate to a certain reality. Manhattan Sunday has autobiographical features, but I wanted the viewer to feel this experience as their own. I wanted these pictures to work as an analogue of their own experience of night parties. It could have been any era. Nevertheless, I decided that I would put the shooting time under each image in the project, for example 05:34. This works especially well in the format of a printed book that fits the narrative structure (in this case, it is "one evening").

I don't think that the changes that have taken place in Manhattan during the time that I have been living here are particularly affected in this work, but it seems to me that they are inevitably touched upon in the discussion of the nightlife of New York. Naturally, there are differences between what was before and what is now, but I was much more interested in the timeless nature of this experience, this desire to lose touch with reality or feel glamorous and sexy. These impulses are always the same. Establishments, ticket prices, styles and the real estate market are constantly changing, but the desire for stimulation, gatherings, tribal worldview and escapism are passed down from generation to generation.

The impact of the spread of AIDS is part of this story. It is not public, but inevitable and implied. The effect that AIDS had on the culture of nightlife and, in particular, on the nightlife of the gay community was very profound. He was strongly associated with the experience of club parties, drug taking and debauchery. In the afterword to the printed book, I touch on the topic of personal anxiety about AIDS and how I became HIV-positive in the mid-90s. Fortunately, with the current progressive methods of HIV therapy, the mortality associated with an active night life has sharply decreased.

Eternity. Greatness. Daydreaming. I realized that photographing in black and white was more suitable for the thoughts I wanted to explore, and would be more merciful towards my characters, who were most likely captured after a long night out. I love color photography, but it was possible to shoot a dedication to Manhattan and club life only in black and white.