It's a window on the world and a world in itself. The cab that Joseph Rodríguez drove for 10 years, from 1977 to 1987, offered him a unique view of New York City and its inhabitants, its chic avenues and its slums, its businessmen, its models, its families, its prostitutes and its homeless. It was thanks to his yellow rental car that the American paid for his photography studies, but also that he produced his first series, before embarking on a long career focused mainly on marginalized communities: Latinos in the Harlem district, Los Angeles gangs or incarcerated juvenile delinquents – series currently on show as part of a retrospective at the Fotomuseum de Maastricht, in the Netherlands.

Brought up in a dysfunctional Brooklyn family that he only sought to escape, Rodríguez, now 73, has himself experienced the streets, drugs and prison. The period in which he began working as a taxi-driver was a turning point for him: After a spell behind bars, he decided to break with his bad company, rid himself of his heroin addiction and go back to school.

He drove from 4 am to 4 pm, in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, still plagued by economic crisis, crime and racial tensions. From this little yellow bubble, he picked up the joys and sorrows of residents from all social classes. "A cab becomes a place to hear stories. It also becomes like a psychiatrist’s office. People have so much to tell you," he writes in Taxi: Journey Through my Windows, 1977-1987 (powerHouse Books, 2020).

15^th Street, 4:30 am

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