Louis Mendes and his jumbo Speed Graphic camera have been fixtures on New York City’s streets for more than 50 years.
Louis Mendes has been photographing people on the streets of New York City for more than fifty years. You may have seen him around: looking dapper in a suit and fedora, his jumbo Speed Graphic camera—the old-fashioned kind the press used to use, with extending bellows and a flashbulb—strapped to his chest.
If his standard fee of twenty dollars is too high, Mendes accepts donations. At times, over the years, he has earned enough this way to get by, but he worked a range of day jobs as well, before Social Security kicked in. In the late nineteen-fifties, when he bought his first Speed Graphic camera, he was working as a stock clerk in Macy’s while going to school to study radio electronics. In the late sixties, he was a building attendant at Port Authority.
At a flea market on Twenty-fifth Street, between Fifth and Sixth, a woman told Mendes that she’d taken his picture once, years ago. She searched through her phone and pulled up the image to show him: a younger Mendes in handsome profile. “It actually wasn’t me,” he said, with a mischievous smile. “Somebody stole my body—I just got it back last night.” “That’s a new one!” Ortiz said, laughing. “I’ve been stealing his lines for ten years.
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