Bruce Gilden (1946) is a photographer born in Brooklyn, New York. Over the years, he has carried out extensive photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England and America. Gilden has published 18 monographs, including Facing New York (1992), Bleus (1994), Haiti (1996, European Publishers Award for Photography); After the Off (1999), Go (2000), Coney Island (2002), Une belle catastrophe (2004), Foreclosures (2013) and Un examen complet de Middlesex (2014).

Shortly after moving to his new home, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of negatives in his personal archives, shot between 1978 and 1984 in his native New York.

From these thousands of images, Gilden selects a few.

With the desire to revisit the work of his youth, these historical archives constitute a priceless treasure trove. We discover an extraordinary New York, revealing this unknown facet of Gilden’s work.

With the energy of a young man in his thirties and without flash (before he became famous for his almost systematic use of it), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere.

In this extraordinary portrait gallery, the mostly horizontal compositions bubble over with energy and the most diverse characters, as if Gilden intended to include everything that caught his eye in the frame.

In this book, we see the outlines of the work that made Gilden famous: movement and tension, instinctive affection for his models and perfect harmony with his city.