A View From Inner Turmoil

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Robert Herman’s New York is a solitary place, where isolated individuals meet the elements on empty streets or subway platforms.

Mr. Herman, 57, came to New York in 1976 to study filmmaking and soon found his calling in photography, wandering the city with a camera and a supply of Kodachrome film that captured the oversaturated reds and blues he saw around him. It was a period of emotional turmoil for Mr. Herman, who was hospitalized several times for what was, much later, diagnosed as bipolar disorder.

“I felt like a very vulnerable person,” he said recently in his studio in Lower Manhattan. “Photography was my intermediary between me and the world. I was trying to find peace wandering the city. After a while you get in a Zen space and the world slows down. And when you’re an outsider, you notice things that other people just walk by.”

Robert Herman “Crossroads of the World, Times Square,” 1980.

He shot in manic states, depressed states and everything in between, capturing the struggles of ordinary New Yorkers in the 1980s and the loneliness that ran through a city where so many people lived by themselves. Photography, he said, was a way to level his mood swings. At one point, he threw himself in front of a U.P.S. truck. Finally, in 1992, he received a proper diagnosis and began effective treatment that quieted the emotional chaos. Through it all, he continued walking and photographing.

Mr. Herman, whose parents owned movie theaters, grew up watching films like “Blow-Up” over and over, and his photographs are intended to be read as still movies, he said.

“I’m a witness,” he said. “I want to record what I see as an outsider and use the frame and light to say something about how I feel about what I’m shooting. Photography shows you how clearly or not you’re thinking. It’s an externalization of your progress.”

Robert Herman “Out in the Field, East New York, Brooklyn,” 1994.

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