In 1956, when she was a child, Sylvia Plachy fled the Hungarian Revolution by hiding in a horse cart. She ended up in New York City, studied at Pratt Institute, and in 1974 landed a gig taking photographs for the Village Voice. Over the next three decades, she treated readers to serendipitous visions of their city that they didn’t know they were missing until she exposed them. Hence, “Unguided Tour,” the title of her long-running feature, which appeared in various sections in the front of the paper.
Plachy’s journeys, always compelling, at times drifted into the surreal, such as one from 1979 that discovers half a dozen heads swamped in a mysterious mist. Tourists lost in a fog? Actors engulfed in theatrical smoke? Unlike the experience of swiping through Instagram, Plachy’s photos slow the eye down and offer a wink that implies, “Take a closer look.” Spend more time with those heads and maybe you’ll decide that this odd gang is melting their way out of a snowdrift.
The images were never given captions, but that was the idea: New York has never been easily explained. Plachy’s pictures give us the startling, the mysterious, the abstract, the poignant, the double take, the beautiful — and we get to make up our own minds.
Art, in other words.
Plachy continues to make the rounds with her camera, and through November 5, at the Bronx Documentary Center, you can see decades-worth of her photos, including tearsheets of her covers and special features for this newspaper, as well as plenty of the pics that made up her Unguided Tour.
Believe us, it’s well worth the trip. ❖
Sylvia Plachy | Echoes and Omens
Bronx Documentary Center
614 Courtlandt Avenue, Bronx
Through November 5
The post Sylvia Plachy’s Photos Guided Us for Decades — Now They’re at the Bronx Documentary Center appeared first on The Village Voice.
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