In May 1980, a twenty-one year old Australian art school dropout arrived in New York with a camera, a bulk film loader, and less than seven hundred dollars.
He found an apartment on Norfolk Street in the Lower East Side. He photographed everything he could afford to.
Over the next six years, he amassed more than 15,000 negatives — the streets of Alphabet City falling apart and being remade, the walls Keith Haring was painting on, the clubs, the rent strikes, the fires, the decade when punk met hip hop and art moved downtown.
NUMBERS is what survived that editing process. 128 photographs. A first book.
It is not a nostalgia project. It is a primary document — made by someone who was there because he had nowhere else to be, and who couldn't stop looking.
Beautifully produced and self-published in a strictly limited edition of 500 copies, NUMBERS is the first in a two-book series exploring Best’s years in New York.
A second volume, … just a New York conversation … will expand on the stories, recollections and observations surrounding the photographs and the path that led him from Australia to New York City.
“Opening Stephen Best’s new book NUMBERS, I was instantly transported back to New York in the 1980’s. His photographs perfectly capture the visceral realness of the city at that time. It’s almost hard to look away from these images.”
Mustapha Khan, Associate Professor of Film, Brooklyn College.
USA wholesale enquiries, contact Kate Maxwell. katemaxwelldesign@gmail.com
"In the 70s and 80s, New York was all grit and texture. I miss its roughness, before it was scrubbed clean, practically every inch fixed up and built out. The squalor was extreme, but so soulful and full of life and energy. It carried both a sense of history and the promise of future possibilities -places to build, grow, and change. This is the essence of the city that Best has captured in NUMBERS."
-Larry Bercow, Photographer, NY.
All other wholesales enquiries, contact Stephen Best stephenbestis@gmail.com