The photographer Susan Schiffman shoots rent-stabilized apartments in the neighborhood intended as portraits of the unseen tenants who live in them. A

A Camera in the East Village, Capturing the Now and the Long Ago

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2024-10-11 22:00:04

The photographer Susan Schiffman shoots rent-stabilized apartments in the neighborhood intended as portraits of the unseen tenants who live in them.

A large part of what’s made New York so, well, New York, is its rent-stabilized apartments. The city has over 960,000 rent-stabilized housing units, according to last year’s Housing and Vacancy Survey, and tenants living in them are protected from sharp rent hikes and are granted the right to renew their leases. This rent regulation system was enacted in 1969, and has allowed for generations of tenants, especially artists, musicians, writers and other creatives, to live in New York.

Just ask Susan Schiffman, a photographer who has lived only in rent-stabilized apartments since she moved to New York in 1979. Since 2016, Ms. Schiffman has been photographing dozens of her neighboring East Village apartments. Her photos depict the clutter that collects when one lives in the same home for decades, the intimacies of people’s domestic lives and the homemade quality of spaces that have never been renovated.

The scenes are timeless in that there are few, if any, elements that give away exactly when they were photographed — many of them look like they were captured decades ago, stuck in past version of New York. The images are meant to be portraits of the tenants, without actually showing any people in them. Ms. Schiffman posts photos from the series, titled “i am a rent stabilized tenant,” on her Instagram and on blog posts on the EV Grieve, a local news outlet.