EAST VILLAGE — Photographer and neighborhood documentarian Bob Arihood died last week after spending years tirelessly chronicling the East Village.
The longtime neighborhood resident died from a combination of heart disease and high blood pressure, the city’s medical examiner said. He was 65.
Arihood’s photographs and reporting on the East Village, often posted on his Neither More Nor Less blog, frequently captured a neighborhood in flux, as waves of gentrification continued to transform the once-gritty area.
He often spent late nights in and around Tompkins Square Park, photographing some of the area’s more well-known personalities and putting a particular focus on its street dwellers.
Arihood — a burly man who could speak as intelligently about European history as he could about the subversive ecosystem of Tompkins Square — got caught up in the infamous riots that gripped the neighborhood in 1988, when police forced squatters out of the park. He was beaten during the chaotic incident, suffering injuries that continued to dog him through the years.
That didn’t stop Arihood from taking daily walks through the neighborhood, his Leica camera firmly held in his hand, training his lens on stories that would have otherwise gone unreported.
“He thought it was important and that the people he photographed were important,” said John Penley, a local photographer and longtime activist, who met Arihood shortly after the Tompkins Square Park riots.
“The forgotten, the homeless, the misfits, the throwaways of society. He photographed them and became friends with them. He’d never turn them down if they asked for money.”
Neither More Nor Less debuted in 2006 with a smattering of posts chronicling the plight of Jim “Mosaic Man” Power, a prolific local artist who also struggled with homelessness.
Arihood would continue to cover the East Village’s carnival of characters, but also take on more meaty stories that gained broader attention — such as the mysterious 2009 death of a woman in Tompkins Square Park, and the police’s arrest of a woman this summer for allegedly sitting at one of the park’s chess tables.
Most recently, Arihood spent time documenting the Occupy Wall Street protest, following a faction of demonstrators near Union Square on a day when about 80 protesters were arrested.
But his work never took him far from the East Village, where he often camped out at longtime Avenue A mainstay Ray’s Candy Store into the wee hours of the morning.
“He was like a father figure in a lot of ways, but with the camera,” Penely explained, adding that the two would often engage in “crazy debates about politics."
“He just had a real interest in everything that was going on over there — small things, changes in the park, how many rats he saw the night before. He was very observant, and that’s part of being a photographer.”
Penley added that the loss of Arihood would leave a gaping hole in the community that relied on him — and which he drew inspiration from.
“That was his family,” he said. “It’s never going to be the same.”
A candlelight vigil for Arihood is planned for Tuesday night at 8 p.m., at Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A near East Seventh Street.
