On photographing New Yorkers and abstract images

As soon I was through with my business in New York, I just put the film in the camera and started photographing people on the streets of New York City. I was fascinated with the people of New York, how they were scurrying from one place to the next, almost oblivious to each other. I thought if I could try to show these people living in New York City on the streets, and you often wonder where they were going and what they were doing. I decided to start to photograph them. I would take two or three rolls of film, usually, when I was there -- into the night. I got on the bus at the Port Authority building, and that's where I got the bus to go home. So I photographed in that general area, also around Times Square and Fifth Avenue, and up Sixth Avenue. "At first, I was shooting the photographs kind of straight. I was trying to get sharp images. The camera was very unobtrusive. In other words, I kind of hid it. I usually shot from the hip. Unless it was something that I could see that I could photograph and capture, [then] I put the camera up to my eye. But most of the pictures I shot from the hip, or from the front. And that way, I was able to get more spontaneous pictures of people. As I moved along in this project, I started to move more and more into the abstract, and using slower shutter speeds. Then I was getting almost abstract images-images that didn't even look like human beings anymore. They were taking on dual shapes and different forms, especially later at night when it got a little darker, and my light was falling, and I was shooting slower and slower -- like maybe a fifteenth of a second, or sometimes a half of a second. I was quite proud of those pictures. I never did anything, really, with them, but I always thought that was another nice project that I was able to complete, and show some results."