It was a spirit that continued to guide his photography when he moved to New York in 1980, just as the city reached new heights of decadence just before the advent of AIDS. Using his camera as his guide, Zownir made his way from his digs in the East Village to explore the streets of New York at its most outlaw.

Hailed by Terry Southern as the "Poet of Radical Photography," Miron Zownir took up photography in the late 1970s when he arrived in West Berlin. Moved by the spirit of punk, Zownir embraced the utopian vision of anarchy and nihilistic self-destruction that flourished openly on the streets and in the sex clubs, drug dens, and nightlife of West Berlin and London.

Before gentrification erased all that had come before, Zownir captured New York’s seedy years when prostitutes walked the streets, movie theaters screened porn around the clock, live sex and peep shows took loose change, and the West Side piers were the ultimate destination for anonymous sex—but also art interventions by Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Peter Hujar in the years following Stonewall.

I started out in Berlin. My girlfriend at the time studied photography and after I got rejected from two film schools, I borrowed her camera, went out into the streets, and did what I still do. It started out as a form of compensation, but I soon was fascinated by the atmospheric, visual, creative, and historical spectrum I discovered in documenting a moment in time.

In Zownir’s pictures, we see the people who often fall through the cracks from the eye of one who understands the struggle and pays respect in the tradition of Bruce Davidson, Nan Goldin, and Larry Clark. In advance of a presentation of his work by Galerie Bene Taschen during Photo London (May 16-19), Zownir takes us on an incredible journey though the New York underground.

Zownir’s photographs show New York after a decade of “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson that reduced large swaths of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Lower East Side to rubble. Real estate was affordable—if not outright cheap—after white flight had sent the middle class out to the suburbs. In their absence, artists like Zownir arrived, mixing and mingling with locals with roots going back generations to create a powerful document of an era that has otherwise disappeared.

From early on, I was inspired by the dark gloom of the dilapidated ruins and wastelands after World War II Germany, its disabled vets and traumatized widows, black and white newspaper photography, silent movies, fairy tales, literature and poetry. I was an observer and dreamer and the people I was most fascinated by were misfits, rejects, outlaws, and strangers. It was only natural for me to focus on the sinister, morbid, forbidden and dangerous aspects of life.

Why did you decide to move to New York in 1980?

After living in Berlin and London, New York City seemed to me the culmination of anything a city could offer. And contrary to now, in the 1970s and 80s, you could venture into almost any city in the Western hemisphere with almost no contacts or any substantial materialistic means if you were adventurous, tough, or desperate enough to take a chance.