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That summer, when I was still lost and unformed, I took a job as a service elevator operator at Third North, the N.Y.U. freshman dorm on Third Avenue in the East Village. On my first day, Shlomo Kaplinsky, the building superintendent, gave me a starched, blue, short-sleeved shirt and hard gray trousers, sat me down on a loading dock in front of the elevator, and explained my job to me: I was to wait for deliveries and, when they arrived, bring the deliverymen down to the basement. At the end of the day I was to take the garbage up from the basement, and put it out on the street.
This was in 1992. I was secular, then, and ambitious. At night I would keep myself awake envisioning the blurbs from Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander that would appear on the back cover of my first book, anticipating the sweet and dignified nostalgia that would infuse the foreword to the catalogue for my retrospective show at the Whitney. I had been raised among the upper ranks of the American middle class in the suburbs outside New York City, and at the time I thought I took my new job because I had never done anything so menial, and because it would benefit my photography to get close to the infrastructure of urban existence. Now, I think I took the job out of diffidence and spite, because I needed to escape the expectations that had defined my life...
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