Eli Reed This photo was taken in 2000 while doing a photo essay in a joint reporting look of our town where we grew up with my friend and writer, Robert Spector, who also played on our Perth Amboy High scho (...)
ol basketball team. I used to go down by the water to draw and paint while I was still in high school. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos
Eli Reed When I was working for the Detroit News newspaper, I suggested that someone should cover the 1980 Liberty City race riots going in Miami, Florida. I told the editor it shouldn’t be me because I was (...)
sick with bronchitis after working Fashion Week in NY and then was begged that I get a picture of Ronald Reagan in Detroit running for President and they wanted a picture showing how he connected with people. The new picture editor, George Waldman, got me to go to Miami because he was new and he is still my friend today. The Miami heat helped me get well. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos
Eli Reed At a playground where I was teaching art to kids at the park on the Saturday when the first Woodstock Music Festival was going on. I wanted to go but I was sure that if I drove from my home in Pert (...)
h Amboy on a 250 street scrambler motorcycle to Woodstock, and I only had a motorcycle permit and got pulled over, I would probably had ended up in jail for at least the weekend. 500,000 fans showed up on Woodstock that Saturday in 1969. Those two kids drove me crazy at the park, so I retreated to my 1951 Chrysler New Yorker. I saw them sliding in the window looking to drive me crazier. My camera was lying next to me on the car floor. The photo was my revenge. Perth Amboy, NJ. 1969. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos
Eli Reed I made a photograph of a good friend and an artist whose studio I inherited in the mid-center downtown Perth Amboy. He was an abstract painter who loved Bob Dylan and who I had some interesting exp (...)
erience. He and Marlene were an item for a while and they were basically from the same cloth which when ever they were - stuff was bound to happen in interesting ways. For example, He dropped a tab of LSD once and I hardly noticed because he was always out there. We ran into a cop as soon as we walked out of the building onto the sidewalk (who was not always a nice guy). Most of the Amboy cops were cool but sometimes this one could be not so nice. The cop started a conversation with my friend and I began sweating bullets inside my stomach. The year was 1969 and we survived the conversation. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos
Eli Reed This painting in the foreground was basically a rough sketch that was done of a planned abstract larger painting I was hoping to do. The smaller painting was a more traditional illustration. Newark (...)
School of Fine and Industrial Arts, New Jersey. Spring semester 1969. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos