Among the denizens of the pre-Disney Times Square was a casually dressed man with unruly white hair sitting in a beat-up Dodge Valiant outside a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. He spent his time listening to a police scanner, which emitted a steady, scratchy stream of reports of gang shootings, car accidents or suicide jumpers.

Ah, Fun City, 1980s edition.

There was so much crime in New York back then that the white-haired man, Andrew Savulich, had his pick of numerous scenes of mayhem he could photograph. It was a more dangerous time to be a New Yorker, but a good time to be a spot news photographer. He often got to crime scenes ahead of the pack, although his photos were a little too strange and quirky for the tabloids. On the rare occasion he sold crime scene photos for $50 or $75 each to newspapers and wire services, editors usually cropped them into more conventional images.

So, on slow evenings Mr. Savulich would leave his car and prowl through Times Square and photograph strange moments that unfolded right in front of him.

“In the ’80s it was still lusciously seedy and wild,” he said. “It was a great place for street photography.”

A selection of his crime and street photos from 1980 to 1995 has been collected in “The City,” published by Steidl. To many of those who know Mr. Savulich and his work, the book is a surprise – not because of the high quality of the photos, but because it happened at all. He is decidedly not a self-promoter.

He did have a small show in 1994 at the International Center of Photography in New York, and a couple in France and Belgium. But his odd personal photos were known mainly to a dedicated band of cult followers.

After working the streets and selling photos in the early and mid-’80s, Mr. Savulich started getting freelance assignments and worked a midnight shift covering spot news for The New York Post. In 1993, he was hired at The Daily News, where he has worked quietly for the last 22 years. His more bizarre images, the ones his followers lust after, rarely made it into print.

“As a freelancer, I almost immediately made the distinction that most photo editors were looking for a certain type of picture,” he said. “But it never really bothered me, because I knew in the 36 frames I was going to get something I liked and hopefully there would be something they’d like.”

Photo

Four years ago, he read an article about Gerhard Steidl, who is widely known as a demanding publisher of exquisite photos. Mr. Savulich had never heard of him. Still, he sent to the publisher’s German office about 120 copies of black-and-white prints, complete with handwritten captions and return postage.

A year passed with no response.

One day, Mr. Savulich received a phone call that Mr. Steidl was interested in publishing the book. Many of the photos scream out for an explanation, including the back-cover image of a woman smiling and laughing inside a demolished car (slide 2).

“I was working overnight for The New York Post,” Mr. Savulich recalled. “I think she was a passenger, and whoever she was with hit a garbage truck, completely smashing the car up. But nobody was seriously hurt. So I show up. I don’t know if she is giddy because she wasn’t hurt or drunk or not. I shot her through the broken window.”

Mr. Savulich was, of course, influenced by Arthur (Weegee) Fellig’s gritty photos of New York. The difference is that Mr. Savulich’s photos were not set up and he has none of Weegee’s flair for obsessive self-promotion. Mr. Savulich also cites Mad magazine and August Sander as his main influences.

Mr. Sander worked in a mine before he became a photographer, something Mr. Savulich can relate to, as he took an unlikely path to tabloid photography. He was born in 1949 in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and both of his grandfathers were coal miners, as was his own father, who quit and moved to New Jersey to become an airplane mechanic when Andrew was 2. After receiving an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture from Rutgers University, Mr. Savulich worked in Boston for five years. But he became entranced with photography and set off to New York in 1976 to follow his dream.

Mind you, he had no idea how to do that. He worked in construction and drove a taxi while he studied painting and sculpture in a master’s program at Hunter College. Then he heard about police scanners, bought one and started making photos that mixed tabloid and artistic sensibilities.

Today the tabloids, like all newspapers, are struggling, and there is much less interest in photographs of car crashes and shootings. But Mr. Savulich still covers breaking news in his distinctive way.

“I feel like I’m actually tuned in to the world and I’m witness to things that are going on in my world,” he said. “I’m making a statement, ‘This is what I’m seeing,’ and someone looking at it hopefully might be moved to stop and stare for a second.”

Andrew Savulich’s new book, “The City,” can be found here.

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