Louis Mendes has been photographing people on the streets of New York City for more than fifty years. You may have seen him around: looking dapper in a suit and fedora, his jumbo Speed Graphic camera—the old-fashioned kind the press used to use, with extending bellows and a flashbulb—strapped to his chest. One recent sunny morning, on the corner of Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, he was wearing an “I Heart New York” tie, his pockets stuffed with Fuji instant film and small individual flashbulbs. He had been taking pictures since 6 A.M. “In New York, you’ve gotta get up early,” he said. “'Cause things change fast.” Accompanied by his friend, protégé, and de-facto manager, Ray Ortiz, Mendes walked south down Fifth Avenue, past the New York Public Library, where tourists took selfies with their cell phones.

Like the late Bill Cunningham, who documented New Yorkers’ fashion choices for the Times for nearly four decades, Mendes is out on the streets taking pictures almost every day. But where Cunningham’s strategy was to blend in with the crowds, Mendes’s is to stand out. “Good morning. Can I take your picture?” a man standing with his wife outside Willoughby’s camera store, on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-first Street, said, his small camera dwarfed by Mendes’s. “Certainly. Can I take yours?” Mendes said without missing a beat. He named his price. “Twenty dollars a photo—that sounds fair,” the man said, smiling, and they exchanged shots. Mendes peeled apart the instant film, exposing a rich, grayscale portrait of the couple, and inserted it into one of his signed paper frames.

Louis Mendes Photograph by Louis Mendes

Mendes gives away the majority of his photos, so his own personal archive is thin. Unlike Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York series, in which the portraits are designed to be shared and liked on social media, Mendes’s images seldom end up online. (Ortiz runs his Facebook page, but it contains few of Mendes’s own photos.) He has exhibited his work only once, in 1995, in Harlem, where he lived for many years before moving into subsidized housing in midtown. “I don’t like exhibits, ’cause people don’t buy no pictures!” he said, hamming it up but not entirely joking.

If his standard fee of twenty dollars is too high, Mendes accepts donations. At times, over the years, he has earned enough this way to get by, but he worked a range of day jobs as well, before Social Security kicked in. In the late nineteen-fifties, when he bought his first Speed Graphic camera, he was working as a stock clerk in Macy’s while going to school to study radio electronics. In the late sixties, he was a building attendant at Port Authority. His supervisor at that job, who was white, didn’t like it when he bought a new car with his savings. Then, one day, in April of 1968, a white police officer said to him, “Your friend got killed today.” Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot. “The way he said it, like he was glad,” Mendes said, was the last straw. He decided to pursue photography full time.

Louis Mendes

He started out shooting parties and night clubs, then moved on to weddings at City Hall, families on Coney Island, the Rockefeller tree and city parades. To help him squeeze multiple family members into a single shot, he developed a method of double exposure, overlaying faces high in the frame—he calls it putting people “up in the sky.” For a time in the nineteen-seventies, he ran a business photographing newborn babies. Instead of buying the list of newborns that hospitals sold to established photographers, he would search for Pampers in the trash cans of brownstones; when he found them, he’d ring the doorbell and ask if anyone was in need of a photographer. Through the years, Mendes said, he has photographed Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Denzel Washington, Spike Lee—even Hillary Clinton, in the theatre district, years ago. He remembers riding the A train to Far Rockaway once when a group of teen-agers asked to be photographed, and one pulled out a gun for the picture. Years later, he photographed the same young man, who had become a construction worker. “I’ve been doing this so long, I’ve seen some people whose grandparents I photographed,” Mendes said. He has two daughters and a son, grown now, but he has never married. “This is my wife right here,” Mendes said, gesturing to his camera. “You know I haven’t been on a date without it in twenty-five years?”

At a flea market on Twenty-fifth Street, between Fifth and Sixth, a woman told Mendes that she’d taken his picture once, years ago. She searched through her phone and pulled up the image to show him: a younger Mendes in handsome profile. “It actually wasn’t me,” he said, with a mischievous smile. “Somebody stole my body—I just got it back last night.” “That’s a new one!” Ortiz said, laughing. “I’ve been stealing his lines for ten years.”

Louis Mendes

Leaving the flea, Mendes ran into an old friend, Geoffrey Berliner, the executive director of the nearby Penumbra Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving historical and emulsion-based photography. They talked shop for ten minutes, lamenting the discontinuation of the Fuji peel-apart film they both love. The flashbulbs that Mendes uses haven’t been made since the sixties, but he has so far been able to find enough of them at flea markets, auctions, and through old photography connections. Mendes has cultivated friendships with many of the city’s other roving photographers. Walking across Fourteenth Street, he ran into a gray-haired street photographer in a red baseball cap. “He’s a New York icon,” the photographer said. The two made plans to meet up at the upcoming Veterans Day Parade. Another photographer, beefy and wearing a black bandanna, was on his way to shoot an assignment when he noticed Mendes. “Hey, chief, I haven’t seen you in sixteen years!” They took each other’s picture. The photographer tucked Mendes's portrait of him into his pocket as he rushed to the subway.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LOUIS MENDES

Back at his apartment that afternoon, Mendes drank a Budweiser and ate an Entenmann’s doughnut from a box sitting atop a mini fridge. His tiny studio is stuffed with books and magazines on photography and black history, and with cameras—a Rolleiflex, a Hasselblad, various Polaroids, and a handful of original Kodak Brownies, the camera his sister used during their childhood, in Jamaica, Queens. The apartment walls are covered with photographs of family, friends, and a number of gauzily lit nudes. The bathroom and closets are filled with packages of flashbulbs. Ortiz elaborated on his dreams for Mendes—a documentary, a foundation, a Louis Mendes-brand camera. Mendes emphasized that he has no desire to be rich, but he seemed pleased at this entrepreneurial vision. “Fame is good,” he said. “But if you don’t got no money, you’re just a photographer that’s broke.”