Although best known for his abstract paintings, Stephen Aiken has also been quietly working over the years as a photographer. The new Letter16 Press book, Artists in Residence: Downtown New York in the 1970s, features Aiken's photos of the bohemian milieu which drew him to lower Manhattan from his native Boston in 1973. A desire to understand that period's artistic ferment, as much as to document it, led Aiken to immerse himself in the then-nascent SoHo art scene. He shot intimate portraits of the emergent artists around him, as well as of the equally unpolished streets that connected their semi-legal lofts to the galleries and nightclubs where they gathered. “When I think back on it, almost the entire culture revolved around the Vietnam War,” Aiken explained. By the fall of 1973 the Vietnam War was winding down, as was the existential dread that had hung palpably over so many of those who were of draftable age. “I think what made the culture spark at that time was a sense of relief.” That newfound energy is writ large throughout these images.