Photo: © Godlis
Best known for his photographs of the burgeoning punk scene down on the Bowery made in between 1976-1979, Godlis created his historic images of downtown New York in the same spirit of Brassaï’s Paris at Night. It was just two years earlier that Godlis created the photographs in Miami Beach that he describes as “the first time I took really good pictures that didn’t look like anyone else.”
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Godlis took up photography in 1972. A year later he began studying at Imageworks Photography in East Cambridge, where he discovered the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Frank. But it wasn’t until he went down to Miami Beach that he found his eye, perhaps due to the fact that he was returning to a pivotal place from his formative years.
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In the 1950s, his grandfather retired and moved to Miami Beach, purchased a multi-apartment complex and began renting out units. He kept a few apartments for the family so they would have somewhere to stay for free. Godlis remembers his mother would take him for a visit during the winter and they wouldn’t return to New York until the weather changed. He went every winter as a child until he was in high school. When Godlis returned to Miami Beach in 1974 at the age of 22, it felt like a homecoming. For the first time since he took up photography, he was able to relax and let the pictures happen.
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