Stoogies

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

During a mid-1980s Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, a trio of exaggerated, caricature-style puppets loom over the nighttime crowd. These handcrafted figures, likely part of the parade's signature large-scale puppetry, feature long, elongated faces with heavy brows and protruding teeth that give them a slightly weary, comical expression. The black-and-white tones of the Tri-X film emphasize the diverse textures of the scene, from the fuzzy hair on the puppets to the dark, leafy silhouettes of the trees overhead. A powerful strobe light cuts through the darkness of the New York City night, freezing the chaotic energy of the march and revealing a participant's face peeking through the open mouth of the puppet on the right. This stark, flash-lit perspective captures the surreal and avant-garde spirit of the era's parade before it transitioned into a more formal, large-scale event.