STATEN ISLAND — A new photography book captures the perms, cut-off shorts and small-town look of Staten Island in the 1980s.
"Summer Days: Staten Island," published last month, features photos by Christine Osinski of the people and landscape of the borough in the summers of 1983 and 1984.
"I walked across Staten Island with my camera taking photographs kind of finding out about the new borough that I moved to," said Osinski. "It was a way for me to explore and photograph at the same time."
The book has 51 black-and-white photos that Osinski shot in the 80s, along with an essay on the series by Paul Moakley, Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise for Time magazine.
For the project, Osinski spent summers walking the various neighborhoods of the borough lugging around a large-format camera and took shots of whatever she stumbled upon that interested her.
"Every time I walked out to photograph, I did not have a script. I did not have a preconceived idea of what I was going to photograph," she said. "It was more just wandering and hoping to find something interesting. Almost always, I found something that was really interesting to me."
In 1982, after Osinski and her husband were kicked out of their loft in Lower Manhattan when it was sold to a developer, the couple looked for a place in the city with cheap real estate and settled on a home in West Brighton.
"We were tired of fixing up places and then getting thrown out," Osinski said. "Somebody suggested that we look in Staten Island. We had taken the ferry a lot in the summer to cool off but we never got off the ferry."
About a year after they moved in and fixed up their new home, Osinski — a Guggenheim Fellow and professor at Cooper Union — had time to grab her camera and explore her new home borough.
Osinski would spend days walking to different neighborhoods around Staten Island and photographing strangers she met, homes she saw and more, rarely coming back to shoot a person or a scene a second time.
She stayed in the borough until they relocated in 1996 but never displayed the shots she took from her time on Staten Island because the lens she used made it difficult to create quality prints from the negatives, Osinski said.
However, several years ago, Osinski was able to use newer scanners to get the quality up to her standards and started to display some of her prints.
After she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, she used some of the funds to collect the series and publish them into a book, which was released in February by Damiani Editore.
"I always really loved this work," Osinski said. "Even though I did all these other projects, I never felt I could really move completely forward in a free way until I really got this work out."
Since she started showing the pieces and the book was published, Osinski said she's been contacted by several people and family members of people she photographed for the project and exchanged emails with some.
Generally people's reactions to the work have been positive, Osinski said, because it shines a lens on a part of the city people don't usually think of.
"There's been a lot of interest in part because Staten Island has not been like seen or photographed that much," she said. "I think it's one of those places that's right under anybody's nose, it's part of New York City, but it has not been really pictured."
