TAXI: Journey Through My Windows by Joseph Rodriguez was made from 1977 to 1987 across New York City and New Jersey, documenting urban life from his working position as a taxi driver.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rodriguez set out to record the city he knew while supporting himself and studying photography. Taxi labor became both the project's subject and its practical structure, carrying him among neighborhoods, social classes, and overlapping daytime and nighttime worlds. His childhood experience of racial discrimination by cab drivers informed his willingness to accept fares across the city. Passengers turned the taxi into what he called a "rolling psychology office," where listening created temporary intimacy. The project consequently examines class, community, sexuality, and social visibility during a period marked by economic crisis, crime, drugs, and the AIDS epidemic.
The black-and-white photographs move between exterior street scenes, rear-seat portraits, and depopulated views of bridges and buildings. Windows, windshields, mirrors, chrome, and door frames repeatedly divide or contain the image, making the vehicle's interior architecture part of the composition. Workers, families traveling to church, sex workers, clubgoers, children, and people asking for money appear across the series. Some subjects face the camera directly, while others register as silhouettes, reflections, shadows, or streaks of movement. These varied encounters produce a mood that alternates between exposure and privacy, fatigue and sociability.
Rodriguez initially photographed primarily through the cab windows before later turning his camera toward passengers in the back seat, expanding the project from street observation to more intimate encounters inside the taxi. Working under economic constraints, he could afford only two rolls of Tri-X film per week during part of the project. The resulting exhibition photographs are gelatin-silver prints. For the 2020 book, Rodriguez arranged and repeatedly revised work prints to evoke a 12-hour taxi shift.
The project was first presented as Journey Through my Windows at Fotograficentrum in Gothenburg in 1988. powerHouse Books published the monograph in 2020 with an essay by Richard Price and support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Subsequent presentations included Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne and Photoville in New York in 2021. Museum Ludwig acquired 29 prints in 2022 and included the series in its 2025 street-photography exhibition. Selections also appeared in ICP's We Are Here: Scenes from the Streets in 2024-25 and the Maastricht retrospective We're All People.
