Dafydd Jones' Photos of New York

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In 1992 I moved to New York for the second and I hoped final time with Linzi, Poppy and Lewis from London. Graydon Carter had offered me the chance to be a staff photographer for the New York Observer. We found an apartment and a school in Brooklyn and for a year I immersed myself in the city.

The writers at the Observer rarely left their desks but would give me leads for pictures to illustrate stories they were working on. I travelled all around the city usually the cheapest and fastest way -- on the subway. Flushing, Coney Island, Flatbush, gradually these and other names became real and vivid places for me. I had to find images that somehow summed up the week or were at least memorable. When a sucessful banker was found dead in a seedy motel in the Bronx, when Ringling's Circus walked it's elephants through the Queens Midtown Tunnel at one a.m, when there was a drag festival in Tompkins Square -- I was sent to do a picture. I saw a lot of the city, warts and all, and fell in love with everything about it.

I felt healthy. Instead of lounging around smoky parties waiting for something silly to happen I was tramping New York in all
weathers. All over, taxi drivers, and one time some kids in the street in Brooklyn, would say, "New York, it's the greatest city in the world - Right?" At first, coming from England, this struck me as a bit over-confident. But soon enough, without irony, I did agree. I would laugh and say - Yes, it is the greatest city in the world!

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