36 Amazing Photographs That Capture Daily Life in New York City in the Early 1980s

Frank Horvat was born in Italy in 1928. During World War II he moved to Switzerland where at the age of fifteen he studied photography. During the late 1940s he went back to Italy where he studied art and worked in advertising. He eventually became a freelance magazine photographer.

New York Up & Down is a photo project, a series of street images which Horvat shot between 1982 and 1986. The photographs were taken by using a Nikon SLR camera with Ektachrome, showing the rawness and grittiness of the city. From the presence of the yellow cabs to the crowded graffiti clad subway cars.

"Between that evening in 1959 and the beginning of my project, in 1982, I came back to New York more than a hundred times, usually to do fashion photos, but in most cases only for two or three weeks. All the same, I have calculated that these trips, laid end to end, would add up to a stay of about two years, which is equivalent to the periods of my adult life that I spent in Switzerland, in Italy, in India or in England. But if they were measured by their emotional intensity, the years in New York would count twice as much… This is what I tried to convey by the words ‘up and down’." - Frank Horvat.

Here's a series of street photographs captured daily life in New York City which Horvat shot from between 1982 and 1986.

(New York Up & Down, Photos © Frank Horvat, via Shooting Film)