When I first moved to New York in 1984, I fancied myself street-smart. Wrong. It turned out I knew nothing about how things worked. Or perhaps I was just very young. In either case (and friends back me up on this) New York was a darker place then, with trash nearly everywhere you looked—much of it fascinating, and some of it on fire.
I felt compelled to pick up the ripped passports, trampled photographs, and blurred notes scrawled in ballpoint pen on the back of empty cigarette packs that I came across almost daily.
I made my collection of junk into a set of 100 2-sided collages, each about the size of a baseball card, and called the project 100 Fugitive Felons. I was gathering evidence, preserving some record of small scale despair; I was a historian of the city’s unknown, unwanted human flotsam, noticing and cataloging the ephemera left in their wake. The set of collages is filed away in a black evidence binder; the cards remind me of mug shots, police blotters, other official record books. Here are the first 58 felons.
