New York City
Public Art New York City
Black and White
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Represented by:

Darrow Samberg

darrow@darrowhomedesign.com

Nyack, New York.

Over five decades, Joe Samberg has compiled a versatile, prolific and provocative body of work. He uses color and black and white and has shot in the streets and in the studio, from Manhattan to Berkeley to Jerusalem.

Samberg’s photography career began in 1969, shooting pictures on the streets of Manhattan near Washington Square Park. In February 1970, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he started photographing the “street kids” of Telegraph Avenue. For three years, Samberg’s camera documented their world of “sex, drugs, and broken couches,” culminating in his first major work, the gritty and intimate “Telegraph Avenue.”

In 1975, Samberg joined the staff of the Oakland Museum of California, where he gained a mastery of interior lighting techniques. In 1984, he opened his own studio and launched a series of still life photographs in deeply saturated colors reminiscent of the hues, lights and deep shadows of Dutch still life painting. In subsequent years he incorporated live models into his studio work.

Although he is based in California, Samberg’s primary muse is still New York City, where he began his photography career. Now, as then, he captures the energy of urban life with its teeming streets, parks and subways. His portraits of New Yorkers in their diverse attitudes and styles, sometimes reflected and fragmented in windows and metallic surfaces, mirror the complexity of the city.

The color work represented in the two N.Y.C. galleries on this website span the years between 2010 to 2015. The black and white photography covers his his work from 1970 to the present.