Remembering John Penley, photographer and activist of the East Village

Image via spagnuolo.nyc

John Penley, the photographer and longtime activist whose presence was a fixture at East Village and Lower East Side protests for decades, died on Sept. 15. He was 74. 

Friends said Penley had been in declining health after being diagnosed with an abdominal tumor and suffering a stroke. He died in Lake Havasu, Ariz., where he had been living in recent years. 

Penley was a familiar figure in the neighborhood's squatter and housing-rights movements and at protests in and around Tompkins Square Park. 

He was both participant and documentarian — carrying a camera while taking part in many of the causes he photographed.

A former Navy servicemember, Penley began photographing demonstrations and political actions as a way of documenting the movements he was involved with, eventually working as a photojournalist. 

His images appeared in The New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, High Times, The Guardian, East Village Eye and other publications. 

His photographs captured a period of enormous change in the East Village and Lower East Side, particularly the battles over housing, squatting and gentrification during the 1980s and 1990s. His work also documented AIDS and gay-rights activism and protests involving police brutality, the death penalty and racial discrimination. 

In later years, he photographed Occupy Wall Street and demonstrations supporting Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. 

Penley's archive — papers, photographs and negatives dating from roughly 1980 to 2013 — is housed at NYU's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Penley began donating the collection in 2009, with additional material arriving in 2013. 

His activism occasionally landed him on the other side of the camera — and in court. In 1982, he was arrested and sentenced for trespassing at the Savannah River nuclear power plant in South Carolina during an anti-nuclear protest. 

Five years later, he was arrested at a rally he organized to register homeless New Yorkers to vote; his archive includes documents from his subsequent lawsuit against the NYPD and then-Mayor Ed Koch. 

By the 2000s, Penley remained an unmistakable neighborhood presence, protesting development and displacement and inserting himself into local battles large and small. (EVG covered many of the events that he organized. Find a sampling here ... here ... and here ... among many others.)

He was known as much for his blunt opinions and colorful personality as for his activism.

His interests and activism extended far beyond the neighborhood. Friends remembered his involvement in struggles from Akwesasne to Oaxaca. 

In his later years out West, he advocated for low-income residents affected by development in Las Vegas, including around the construction of the Sphere. 

But much of what Penley saw through his camera remains here. Thousands of his images preserve an East Village and Lower East Side of protests, squats, artists, activists and street life — and the neighborhood fights in which he was rarely just an observer.

Photo by Paul DeRienzo via Facebook