![If You Licked These Photos They Would Taste Like New York. (So Don’t Lick Them.)](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/28/lens/30NewYork2/8d8bf7d12dee4a84b57f83a2e9d9a84e-facebookJumbo.jpg?year=2019&h=550&w=1050&s=355636af22ae797c572700899eba6988f2a3cebd63614794d9fef016cee1e84d&k=ZQJBKqZ0VN)
A peculiar thing about The New York Times’s photo archive is how many acres of it are devoted to nothing. The Great Flood, the Moon Landing, I Have a Dream, Honey Boo Boo — absolutely. But also: rainy streets, forlorn bus stops, beefy pipe fitters, decaying wall posters, imprudent beach attire. A lost shoe that tells you everything you need to know about Bloomberg-era New York.
Drawer after drawer after terabyte of them. Did any photo editor from The Times ever say, “Get me pictures of balloons on a subway platform?” Not likely. Staff photographers, when not shooting the things that make people move to the city, record the stuff that defines life once you arrive.
That manhole cover when you’re leaving the club at 4 a.m.? That dinner party where people seem to have gotten different messages about the dress code? That dog owner who thinks her pet is hot stuff, when, whatever? We’ve all been there, and the chances are that a photographer was there with a camera.
If you have ever pumped a quarter into a flying elephant outside a Chinatown drugstore and watched your child have the time of her life, we’ve got a photo for you.
Hearts break, batteries fail, rain happens, animals appear, machines grind and people find the darnedest ways to amuse themselves. Photographers from The Times capture all of it. Sometimes it involves signs in foreign languages. Also, dogs and/or food. The volume of images is staggering.
It’s what happens when you turn a bunch of talented staff photographers loose in a city as visually cacophonous as New York. They take liberties. They don’t listen to reason. You send them to shoot a City Council news conference in Woodside, Queens, and they come back with three teenagers on a crumbly stoop, drinking Cokes out of long-necked bottles, or a plastic bag stranded in a tree. Who asked for that?
Yet that’s New York, isn’t it? It’s the stuff you’re too busy to notice, or you can’t get to because you can’t be everywhere. It’s what idle hands do when they happen to belong to Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers and there’s a camera on them and nothing else to do. Did you see the reflection of that neon sign in the flooded pothole? Click. Click click click.
If you licked these pictures they would taste like New York. Which is why you don’t lick them.
Five hundred of these photos, including the ones seen here, are gathered in a new book called “Only in New York,” published by Rizzoli. They cover more than a century in the city, in sickness and in health. Mostly, they’re glimpses of the ordinary in a city that is anything but. Sometimes the moment is more than that.
If you’ve ever wondered whether Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka could cut a rug, you’ll find the answer to that and other mysteries within.
Though, really: Shame on you for doubting.