These photos were taken during the first half of the 1980s, mainly at Coney Island. The camera used was a Bronica medium format and the film is mainly Ilford FP4 I developed myself. I suspected that the City could not long remain in the neglected, often abandoned condition it was in then and I wanted to capture a few traces of its decayed and forsaken beauty before this was swept away. As it happened, not only did the derelict New York of my youth vanish, but so also did black and white analogue photography itself. I scanned my old negatives and posted them here to commemorate the now lost New York in which I grew up, as much as my own intoxication in those distant days with states of pensive solitude.

All images copyright of James Bloom