Richard Sandler (born 1946) is an American

street photographer Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within Public space, public places. It usually has the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by caref ...

and

documentary filmmaker A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". The American author and media analyst Bill Ni ...

who has made work in New York City. His photographs have been published in ''The Eyes of the City'' (2016) and are held in the collections of

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

and the

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 5,000 years of history with nearly 80,000 works from six continents. Follo ...

. His films include ''The Gods of Times Square'' (1999), ''Brave New York'' (2004), and ''Radioactive City'' (2011). He has received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

for filmmaking. Sandler has a retrospective exhibition on at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City from February 11 to March 26, 2023.

Life and work

Sandler grew up in

Forest Hills, Queens Forest Hills is a neighborhood in the central portion of the borough of Queens in New York City. It is adjacent to Corona to the north, Rego Park and Glendale to the west, Forest Park to the south, Kew Gardens to the southeast and Flushing ...

, New York City. In 1968, he moved to Boston to work as a

macrobiotic A macrobiotic diet (or macrobiotics) is an unconventional restrictive diet based on ideas about types of food drawn from Zen Buddhism. The diet tries to balance the supposed yin and yang elements of food and cookware. Major principles of macrobio ...

chef, and later as an

acupuncturist Acupuncture is a form of alternative medicine and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body. Acupuncture is a pseudoscience; the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientifi ...

. At some point he boarded with motivational psychologist

David McClelland David Clarence McClelland (May 20, 1917 – March 27, 1998) was an American psychologist, noted for his work on motivation need theory. He published a number of works between the 1950s and the 1990s and developed new scoring systems for the ...

and his wife Mary. "Mary gave Sandler her

Leica Leica may refer to: Companies * Ernst Leitz GmbH, later divided into: ** Leica Biosystems GmbH, a cancer diagnostics company ** Leica Camera AG, a German camera and optics manufacturer ** Leica Geosystems AG, a Swiss manufacturer of surveying and ...

3F in 1977 and taught him how to develop film in their basement darkroom." That year he began making photographs on the streets of Boston, which led to him working as a

photojournalist Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (suc ...

. Three years later he moved back to New York City where he continued to make street photographs until

September 11, 2001 The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

. Sandler had begun making films in New York in the early 1990s and after 9/11 he switched from photography to filmmaking, producing a series of free-form documentaries. His book, ''The Eyes of the City'' (2016), contains photographs made between 1977 and the weeks before 9/11 in New York and Boston, with most from between 1977 and 1992 in New York, and several from Boston.

Publications

*''The Eyes of the City''. Brooklyn, NY: powerHouse, 2016. With a foreword by

David Isay David Avram "Dave" Isay (born December 5, 1965) is an American radio producer and founder of Sound Portraits Productions. He is also the founder of StoryCorps, an ongoing oral history project. He is the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, ...

and an afterword by

Jonathan Ames Jonathan Ames (; born March 23, 1964) is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs, and is the creator of two television series, ''Bored to Death'' (HBO) and '' Blunt Talk'' (Starz). In the late '90s and early 2000 ...

. .

Films

Sandler directed and produced the following documentaries: *''The Gods of Times Square'' (1999) *''Brave New York'' (2004) *''Sway'' (2006) *''Everybody Is Hurting'' (2006) *''The Rocks of Eternity: Conversations with Satish Kumar'' (2007) *''Forever and Sunsmell'' (2010) *''Radioactive City'' (2011)

Exhibitions

*''The Eyes of the City'', a retrospective, the Bronx Documentary Center, New York City, February 11 – March 26, 2023

Awards

*2006:

from the

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation is a private foundation formed in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Gr ...

for filmmaking

Collections

Sandler's work is held in the following permanent collections: *

, Brooklyn, NY: 2 prints (as of 3 October 2022) *

, TX: 1 print1 (as of 3 October 2022)

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Sandler, Richard 20th-century American photographers American street photographers Photographers from New York City American documentary film directors Film directors from New York City Film producers from New York (state) American documentary film producers People from Forest Hills, Queens Living people 1946 births