Every Halloween for 20 years, Seymour Licht went underground to photograph New York’s ghouls and monsters, on their way to and from parties
ore than 20 years ago the photographer Seymour Licht was on an assignment to capture images of the annual Halloween pageant in Greenwich Village. The floats and crowds at the carnival were hard to make sense of visually, and Licht’s eye was instead drawn to the individual ghouls and goblins he had seen on the subway getting there.
There were nights when he would ride the subway for hours without getting a picture; other times deviant nuns and Dracula brides formed spontaneous pairings. By the time he took the woman with the hare’s head, Licht had perfected the contrast between “the mundane and the fantastical” that had first drawn him to the idea, isolating his surreal subjects against mass transit geometries and signage.
You sense, looking through the book, that what began as a series of comic juxtapositions became over the years just a little more unsettling. As Licht writes: “Both the subway andhave associations with death. The New York subway is located not ‘six feet under’, but about 180ft below ground at its deepest point.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Halloween crush haunts survivors one year after Seoul crowd disasterBy the end of the night, 159 people would be dead, many of them young Koreans in their 20s and 30s.
Read more »
Trick or treat? The spooky history of HalloweenHalloween has been celebrated in Australia since the 19th century. Where did it really come from? And what does it mean today?
Read more »
Trick or treat? The spooky history of HalloweenHalloween has been celebrated in Australia since the 19th century. Where did it really come from? And what does it mean today?
Read more »
Pink, plastic and terrifyingly popular: Barbie is Australia’s preferred Halloween costume this yearThe doll has topped Google Trends most searched costumes for October in NSW, Victoria and NT - but other parts of the country have different ideas
Read more »
Pics reveal where every blonde was last nightCOMMENT
Read more »
Backlash over display at Boost Juice storeA Boost Juice store has been slammed for going “too far” with its Halloween decorations after “gory” images of severed limbs were strung across the Western Australian shop.
Read more »