She's actually one of my strongest inspirations as someone who plays at shooting on the street. Because I don't consider most of her work to have great artistic content (although a few of them are incredibly artistic). But the bulk of her work is just really amazing documentary photography. You look at a bunch of her work done in the same time and place and you're THERE. Look at her B&W stuff from the '50s and then look at her color work from the '70s and she's documenting very very different eras and places and in both case, you're transported back to those eras and locales and you're struck by just how overwhelmingly different it all looks and feels today. And to me, that kind of shooting is in reach for a lot of us. I see the work of some street shooters who I consider to be fairly brilliant artists and I feel like I could never aspire to that kind of work. But I can aspire to do what she did. I'm not under any illusions of being in the same league with someone like her in terms of quality of work, but I think if someone stumbled onto the best of my work in 40-50 years, they'd get a pretty good feel for what it looked and felt like to be alive today in the Philly, Atlantic City, New York area. Very few of my shots contain much "art" and what little there may be of it is mostly accidental, but I think I'm making a bit of a document of this time and this area. And I think quite a number of folks on this forum and elsewhere are also doing this kind of work. Most of it will never be seen after we're gone, but I like the idea that if someone were to dig it up, it would make for a pretty interesting little tour through this time and place.
So I'm pretty deeply grateful to this lonely and unappreciated (in her time) woman.
-Ray