A Camera and an Eye, Both One of a Kind

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

FORGET what your parents told you: money does grow on trees. Well, at least for the street photographers who work the crowds around the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, it does. With digital cameras and ink-jet printers powered by car batteries, they churn out images at about $10 a pop.

Multimedia

Polaroid Photographer

Louis Mendes

VISION Mr. Mendes often creates double exposures. 

Arrivistes, as far as Louis Mendes is concerned. Where is the skill in setting a camera to “automatic” and pushing a button? Where is the permanence in a shot printed with no-name ink on no-name paper? Where is the craft?

In his hands. Mr. Mendes works the same crowds — and parades, graduations and concerts — cradling like a piece of sculpture a vintage Speed Graphic camera outfitted with two flash units and a Polaroid back.

That’s right, instant film, a phrase that sounds almost as dated as “electric typewriter.” In an age when digital photography offers instant gratification and cameras come in most phones, who would have thought a decent living could be had taking pictures with a vanishing technology?

Mr. Mendes does, and well enough to do it full time. He can sometimes charge as much as $20 for a portrait, depending on the location.

“I’m the only one with this camera,” he said one afternoon last week as the sun set and the wind whipped through the streets. “This is about a moment for nostalgia. People see these cameras in movies, but they’ve never seen one in person. But when they see this, they go: ‘Ooh. Ahh. Wow.’ ”

As if on cue, a young man who had just taken a picture of his friends with a tiny digital camera looked longingly at Mr. Mendes’s rig the way an econobox owner might swoon over a vintage Benz.

“I get that a lot,” Mr. Mendes said. “I really don’t even have to talk to get customers.”

He had started the afternoon outside Dean & Deluca on 49th Street: “Picture with the tree? Picture with the tree?” Maureen Behnke, visiting from New Jersey with her children, took him up on it. He posed them, shot the frame, pulled the film from the camera and tucked it under his arm. As they waited, he offered tips on what to do in the area.

“It was about a moment,” she said of her decision to be photographed. “I told my son he would never be this little again. In 20 years, he’ll be an adult.”

“And you’ll have a classic,” Mr. Mendes said as he handed her back the 2-by-3-inch photo in a holiday frame.

Suitably suave at 70, he has been doing this for almost 40 years now. He is nothing if not stylish, decked out in a red turtleneck, gray blazer and long black leather coat. As always, he sports a black hat whose left brim is clipped up with — what else? — a pin shaped like a Speed Graphic. A fan on his Facebook group called him “Shaft with a camera.”

If you have been at any parade or major event in New York — or the Super Bowl or the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans — you have seen Mr. Mendes. You might even have had him snap your portrait. Though at this time of year he does straightforward images with the tree in the background, he has also specialized in double exposures in which the subject appears twice, sometimes in different outfits or different seasons.

Yes, he knows Photoshop can let a novice achieve a similar effect. But that’s cheating.

“I can do it on the spot,” he said. “You don’t need a lot of stuff to make a shot. You don’t need lights and tripods. Just look at your subject, look at the light and shoot. You don’t need to take a thousand pictures to get a good picture. You need one good picture. One shot.”

As for those other guys selling pictures on the street, he pays them no mind. Competition, they are not. Some of them don’t even take a single shot; like barkers working for a photographer, they instead weave through the crowds holding out a sample 8-by-10 to lure customers. Frankly, some of them look like their only photo experience was at Central Booking.

“They’re not really photographers, more like picture hustlers,” he said of the shooters who hire the barkers. “They just push a button. They don’t know aperture priority from shutter priority. This, this is me priority. All manual. I set it.”

Mr. Mendes plans to work the Rockefeller tree until Jan. 7, when it is scheduled to be taken down and turned to mulch. Then he will return to the sidewalk outside BH Photo or Adorama Camera. Taking pictures of people who already own cameras makes perfect sense to him, the guy with instant film and a classic rig in a sea of digital snappers.

“Most photographers don’t have a good picture of themselves,” he explained. “They think nobody can take as good a picture as they can. So, I prove them wrong. There’s good money there.”