During the last few months I've been running into Sylvia Plachy at photo events around town. I've always been a fan of her work, so when I saw that she is giving a presentation at the Mid-Manhattan Library tonight I picked up the phone.

Peggy Roalf: What led you to the post of photo editor and staff photographer at the Village Voice?

Sylvia Plachy: After graduating from Pratt Institute I got a job at New York magazine, which at the time was new. Clay Felker (1925-2008) and Milton Glaser had started it as the Sunday magazine for The New York Herald Tribune; when the paper folded [in 1968], they took it with them. I did picture research and shot for the "Intelligencer" section, mostly covering the downtown scene. Then Clay Felker bought the Village Voice [in 1974]; after I had my son [the actor Adrian Brody] I went to work there.

Left: A floating screening, part of the Rooftop Films series. Right: Bambi the Mermaid, Coney Island, Brooklyn. Sylvia Plachy, from Goings On About Town: Photographs for The New Yorker (Aperture/The New Yorker, 2007)

PR: Is that when you became the photo editor?

SP: Yes, I took that job on the condition that I was guaranteed one shooting assignment every week.

PR: Did the editing job influence your work as a photographer?

SP: Sure it did. Just looking at so many photographs, selecting what I felt worked best for the paper and then arguing it into print - because most editors are word people, not visual people -- made me very sharp about my own photographs.

PR: How did the "Unguided Tour" section come about?

SP: It was really a fluke. One day the editor announced that he would make space for a single uncaptioned image opposite the content page every week and I said, "Great - I'll do it." At first it was called "Found Memories." But I soon figured out that what I wanted to do was to walk around and find something surprising to shoot. It's a rare freedom to do whatever you want as a photographer -- that almost never happens - so I wanted a title that better expressed this. My husband actually came up with "Unguided Tour," and it stuck. Then when I did the book with Aperture (1990) it was also very loose - a collection of about 100 images that I felt had the sense of a moment you least expect, something that gives you a spark in your life

PR: I remember the Voice during those years - it really was the downtown "paper of record."

SP: Yes it was a really great time. I remember at one point taking a workshop with Clay Felker and Milton Glaser in a loft somewhere, and we would come up with new ideas for magazines. It's a wonderful thing to work for a newspaper or magazine that lets you explore what you love about the city. I still have people come up to me and say that my work at the Voice influenced them; some have even said that it's why they became photographers. It's been a wonderful life and I can't complain.

Sylvia Plachy will present her photographs for The New Yorker magazine's "Goings On Around Town" section as well as other New York photographs made from 1961 to 2007 at the New York Public Library tonight, July 14, at 6:30 pm. Mid-Manhattan Branch, 455 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 212-340-0849. Copies of Goings On About Town (Aperture/The New Yorker 2007) will be available.