Olive Eyes

16x20 inch Black & White print on Epson Art Cotton Smooth 250 gram paper. From the NYC Village Halloween Parade, 1982–86.

An imposing, elongated puppet face dominates the foreground of this black-and-white scene, its hollow eyes and weathered, textural surface brought into sharp relief by the burst of a powerful professional strobe. Captured at the NYC Village Halloween Parade between 1982 and 1986, the photograph utilizes the rich, grainy aesthetic of Tri-X film to emphasize the eerie, handcrafted details of the skeletal figure. In the background, the sharp illumination from the 35mm Pentax reveals a skeleton-clad reveler gesturing toward the crowd, while other costumed participants blend into the dark, energetic atmosphere of the Greenwich Village night. This high-contrast black-and-white frame documents the intersection of large-scale puppetry and the spontaneous, gritty street theater that defined the parade's mid-eighties era.