In the early 1990s, unable to pay the rent on her apartment in Brooklyn, photographer Ash Thayer, then a struggling art student in New York City (NYC), found a home with the squatters who populated the derelict buildings on the Lower East Side.
Left to rot, these tenements had been abandoned during the financial crisis that had brought NYC to the brink of bankruptcy 15 years earlier. With the city’s infrastructure in tatters, the wait for low-income housing was interminable. These buildings became illegal havens for those who otherwise would have been living on the streets of what was one of the city’s most nefarious neighbourhoods.
Squatters have a bad rep. Labels like freeloader and troublemaker, dog their steps. But Thayer’s experience and her documentation of the years she lived as a squatter tell a different story. Certainly many were radicals, anarchists, and free spirits, but the squatters were also a community that looked after each other and worked together to create liveable habitats.
Growing up in Memphis, Thayer, who was ostracised by the popular kids at school, naturally gravitated towards the fringe crowd. By the age of 17 she was living in an all-girl punk household. Her early experiences laid the groundwork and when she found herself with nowhere to live in NYC, and with an invitation to join the See Skwat, she didn’t hesitate.
Carrying her camera everywhere, Thayer began to photograph her new surrounds. She wasn’t a blow in, she was part of the community, and as such gained access that outsiders were denied. She lived rough – many of the buildings she squatted in had little electricity and no running water. She foraged for food in dumpsters finding the refuse of an overfed, wasteful city surprisingly edible. She gained building skills, helped her fellow squatters create homes out of the rubble, and learned about the politics of city housing, inequality and the callousness of eviction.
Her experiences during the eight years she lived in squats, come together in the book ‘Kill City,’ which is nothing short of extraordinary. Published by powerHouse ‘Kill City’ takes the reader on a journey into a world that few have experienced, and even fewer understand. Thayer’s photographs are so intimate that in many ways ‘Kill City’ is like a family album, albeit with an edge that firmly positions it in a time and place that is like no other.
It is the personal that moves Thayer’s images from purely documentary, to a deeper level weaving a story that unfolds with the turning of each page. While there is no dressing up the reality – this is living hard – the photographs are not without hope. In fact as the book progresses the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the squatters becomes evident as we see the homes they have created in spaces that ordinarily would be bereft of warmth and life. By the time we reach the photographs of the street demonstrations it is clear that the squatters are not a disparate bunch, but a community fighting for its rights. Here the story reaches beyond the news headlines propelled by Thayer’s deeply personal narrative to deliver rare insights.
Thayer skilfully melds images of a city’s decrepitude with street scenes and intimate portraiture creating a rich visual archive. Thayer and her fellow squatters worked and partied hard. Some became parents, others fought for justice, but all contributed to the building of their community. While she lived in the squats Thayer managed to finish art school gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts and much of the work she shot during this time is represented in ‘Kill City’.
Thankfully, despite the hardships she faced, Thayer kept taking photographs or this chapter in New York City’s history would not have been told with such honesty and perspicacity.
BOOK
Kill City: Lower East Side Squatters 1992-2000
Ash Thayer
powerHouse Books
ISBN: 978-1-57687-734-0
175 pages
http://www.powerhousebooks.com
http://www.ashthayer.net/killcity
