Transcription
I mean, this is the way the city looked, or the subway looked, I should say, back in 1980, said my name is Joseph Rodriguez, and I've been a documentary photographer for 30 years.
I was born and raised in New York in the late 1970s. While I was going to school, I became a cab driver, a taxi driver, to supplement my income as a student. This taxi project is not like an HBO documentary series about who's in the backseat. It's really about what our city looks like from a taxi driver's standpoint, and it's one of the, I think, one of the most interesting ways for a photographer to shoot the street.
The way I worked with this project was, I didn't always just photograph in the cab. I also photographed my way home. I also photographed how I felt at that evening. You know, what we saw, what we saw in terms of some family and, you know, coming out after work. And then this Fiorucci model, which is quite fantastic, because there was a, I mean, as typical of a fashion shoot in New York City, you have a very sexy feel. A Fiorucci model walking down with her clothes on with the stylist and another stylist. And the truck drivers and the cab drivers were all screaming, as you can imagine, "Sexy! Hey, cutie!"
I was parked, grabbed a cup of coffee right over here on the 59th Street or 50th, whatever street that was, and then was going back on my coffee to the cab, and he had an accident because he was looking at the girl, so he crashed right in. So everybody's laughing, you know, these quiet little moments.
My garage was on 15th Street and Ninth Avenue, the corner there. And so I would go in at about 3 o'clock in the morning. So there's, there's a lot of things that happen during the night in New York that I started to sort of open my eyes up to as cab drivers back then. You know, you could always spark a conversation. You'll know if somebody doesn't want to talk. But today, people don't really converse so much because of the way we communicate. So, you know, people are busy on their phones, and they weren't phones back then.
So, I mean, my cab was very much like, you've heard this cliché before, but really like a psychologist's office. I mean, I would get all kinds of questions and issues to talk about from, you know, cheating husbands to, where to invest on Wall Street.
I always loved this, this photo of this transvestite, which is on my wall here, with her little pocketbook. What I like about this photograph, I still do, is it's just this way of her being free. We were driving the cab, and you could see us in queue here. So then she was like, "Hey, sweetie, here I am." So, and I said something like, "I really like your pocketbook." She needs a little pocketbook there. And that was it. It was pretty much a, a quick, you know, hello and goodbye, because she's out there to make money, right? So am I. So, you know, time is of the essence.
I learned so much about people and humanity by being a taxi driver. Much more important than learning how to take the picture, learning the art of listening. That was the key. I think that helped me become a much better photojournalist. Real life is, I mean, it couldn't, you can't get any better than that. And for filmmakers and storytellers, I think it's like, I would almost, in an ideal world, making an internship to be a taxi driver.