Olive Eyes

Archival 16x20 inch black-and-white fine art print on Epson Art Cotton Smooth 250 gram paper. NYC Village Halloween Parade street photography, Greenwich Village, 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.