When I was 18, I came into an inheritance from my father. I used it to buy a Pentax K1000. I knew nothing about photography, but a close friend had recently purchased a 35mm camera. I loved the way it felt in my hand.
I grew up in the Bronx, my parents were Puerto Rican. After my father died when I was five, my mom and I moved to a small apartment in South Bronx so she could be near her sister. I grew up in the centre of a vibrant community. In the summertime, everybody was out on the streets. The pumps would be open, there’d be games of dominoes, men would be playing congas. Every bodega was owned by Puerto Ricans – walking down the block I’d hear everybody speaking Spanish, like my parents always had.
Around 1968 or 69, strange stuff started happening. Buildings were slowly being abandoned. Landlords were cutting services such as electricity to force out their tenants, and there were lots of fires – insurance paid better than rent. By the time I bought my camera in 1979, the fire years were coming to an end but the Bronx had become the poster child for poverty in the United States – even though the community remained strong and other parts of the city were also in decline.
The first thing I pointed my camera at was all my friends, the people I was getting high and goofing around with. They mocked me at first - they’d call me “Jimmy Olsen” – but eventually they forgot what I was doing and I progressed as a photographer because of them. Later, Mel Rosenthal would teach me to put them in the context of the environment we were in. History was happening to us, so I was capturing the insider’s view.
These are my boys Carlos and Boogie on the 6 Train. Carlos was my very first friend in the apartment building where I lived as a boy. People often considered us brothers. We had many adventures exploring the streets and running across rooftops, and we used to play with toy soldiers.
By the time this was taken, in 1984, Carlos tended toward depression. He had just come out of the army and something about that experience kind of broke him. It was never clear exactly what had happened, but it was palpable – that’s a fairly typical expression on his face. It was the start of his descent into drug use: he got addicted to heroin and died after overdosing. Growing up, we’d both hated addicts and didn’t want anything to do with that scene. It scared us. So how Carlos ended his life was very painful.
Meanwhile, Boogie’s just being Boogie. He was the comedian of the group. He also joined the army, but when he came back he was still Boogie. We were going down to 42nd Street, to see a movie double-feature or something. I used to always have my camera, so when Boogie started twirling around that bar I shot four or five frames.
That’s typical of how subway trains looked back then, they were always heavily tagged. It got to the point where it was an exercise in futility for the transit authority to try to clean them. They’d paint over the graffiti and people would come on and say, “Oh look, a fresh surface!” and just start tagging again. I never was into graffiti but graff heads recognise a lot of the tags in my photos. One of the most prominent ones is Zephyr. You can see his name here, right above Boogie. Zephyr developed a name for himself and he has since exhibited all over the world.
A lot of my earliest work has been lost over the years – including colour stuff, which I couldn’t afford to do much of back then. But some of the collection survived and I’ve put together a book documenting those times. A couple of the friends who appear in it got pretty emotional seeing those pictures again. I sent Boogie a copy and he found the package on his porch after getting home in the early hours after a really bad night at work. He popped it open and got so excited going through it that he went and woke up his wife.
Ricky Flores’s CV
Born: New York, 1961
Trained: “Self-taught at first, then formally at Empire State College”
Influences: “Many photographers who specialised in documentary and photojournalism, including Danny Lyon, Mel Rosenthal, Susan Meiselas, Jack Delano, and Hiram Maristany.”
High point: “Releasing my early body of work in book form. It was a deeply reflective process that allowed me to look at that early body of work from the backend of a 40-plus-year career in photojournalism.”
Low point: “The systematic dismantling and destruction of local news media in the US and around the world. The impact of that loss is incalculable, and its effects are being felt in the age of disinformation.”
Top tip: “Whether you know it or not you are living in history, and the world is changing dramatically even if you not perceiving it. If you are a photojournalist, it is your responsibility to document it as you see it, maintaining the highest level of ethical standards, and not manipulate the events you are witnessing. That is what will differentiate you and the billions of cellphone photographers out there - your integrity”
• South Bronx Family Album, a personal archive containing more than 450 of Flores’s images, is available now.
