Taxi Driver was released on 8 Feb. 1976.

Writer Paul Schrader stated his influences and inspiration for the film:

“Before I sat down to write Taxi Driver, I reread Sartre’s Nausea, because I saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero, that is, the man from The Stranger [Camus], Notes from the Underground [Dostoevsky], Nausea, Pickpocket [Bresson], Le Feu Follet [Malle], and A Man Escaped [Bresson], and put him in an American context. In so doing, you find that he becomes more ignorant, ignorant of the nature of his problem.

What Julius Cesar would look like today (Becca Saladin)

Unknown model for Harper’s Bazaar US, 1998

A school in Russian prison

I wander among rosy shadows like a homeless god. The tears fall where I walk, the tears of one as hard as stone.

Edith Södergran, from The Instrument’s Lament

Academy Awards: 53rd Annual," Robert De Niro. 1981. | Best actor.

Bouquet of White Chrysanthemums

Henri Fantin-Latour, 1869.

Risiko Bar, West Berlin

Do you ever feel lonely? London Underground. Shot on film.

American Psycho, 2000

Death or glory

Details from Night by Lancelot Speed (British, 1860-1931) and Henry Justice Ford (British, 1860-1941) for Andrew Lang’s The Blue Poetry Book, 1912.

The Doom Generation, 1995, directed by Gregg Araki

Tonight, utterly mad with this solitude.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty wr. c. September 1962

Planet Saturn, observed by Voyager 1, 1980.

Albert Edelfelt - Pine Branch, c.1885

"In life you don’t rise up, you go down. She couldn’t anymore. She could not get down to where I was … There was too much night for her around me."

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of Night, 1932

From the "Sailboats and Swans" series — Portraits of Russian and Ukrainian Prisoners by Michal Chelbin.

On Valentine's Day of 1884, just 36 hours after the birth of their only daughter, Alice, 25-year-old future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt held his young wife in his arms as she passed away from undiagnosed Bright's disease. Incredibly, just hours before, in the same house, he had already said a final goodbye to his mother, Martha. She had succumbed to Typhoid, aged just 48.

Theodore's diary for that day read as follows.