New York in Black and White

John Haber
in New York City

Roy DeCarava and Alvin Baltrop

Roy DeCarava never had to look far for the decisive moment. He found it day after day and hour after hour in a decisive city. As an African American and a photographer in the fine-art tradition, he was bound to find it, too, in black and white.

A man stands in the doorway of an office building, while a woman on the sidewalk looks away. They could be on their way to work or killing time, but they do not have time for each other. Is it a coincidence that a white male has a place inside the world of high finance, leaving a black woman stuck outside? Maybe so, but he is framed by a darker interior while she is bathed in sunlight, and now they are forever united in a photograph. It falls near the opening of a gallery show on the scale of a museum retrospective. It spans nearly half a century, from a photographer who outlived a gay African American in the AIDS crisis, Alvin Baltrop, on view in the Bronx—but it sticks in memory as the portrait of a vibrant city around 1970, with music in the air.

The decisive city

Roy DeCarava knew his way around New York. Born in Harlem Hospital, he attended public schools and a local art school. Well before Jason Moran, he knew the city's jazz clubs, parks, and streets. He photographed Wall Street at dawn, when only a street lamp pierced the darkness, and midtown on a busy afternoon. He ran his own photography gallery on the Upper West Side, like a rebuke to Alfred Stieglitz before him downtown. He knew Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden when the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was still vital and visible on all sides.

He captured the city in its casual moments and in motion, and he moved others, in the Kamoinge Workshop, to do the same. White bankers have left their office, with their straw hats and canes. Black workers hauling boxes are keeping the garment district alive. Bearden lifts his brush, as he must have done a moment before and would do again and again before completing a painting. John Coltrane on tenor sax and Elvin Bishop on drums are just running through their set. Four bass players hanging out together make a disarming string quartet.

Still, DeCarava sought the "decisive moment." Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, who coined the term, he bridged fine art and photojournalism. The hull of a ship in New York's harbors has its parallel in a swan's neck or the curve of a human body, the closest he ever comes to a nude. He works in black and white even as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz are turning to color—and he sticks with it until his death just weeks short of turning ninety. And yet black and white cannot help being about race. In turn, it cannot help being about divisions and inclusivity in a divided but inclusive city.

It also cannot help being about people in that extraordinary "ongoing moment." As for Paul Strand, subjects never acknowledge the camera and make themselves felt even in their absence. They leave their traces in the city's trash and the rubble of an empty lot. Wall Street will soon have its brokers waving their arms, and a booth in a diner has its unfinished drink and a coke. They appear in portraits of the African American community, most especially its jazz and its arts. Even at a Freedom March, where Kwame Brathwaite or Gordon Parks at home and on the street sees a movement, DeCarava zooms in on just one woman's face.

They seem most themselves, though, in pairs, whether in conflict or in communion. Some, like a father's arms lifting up his son or a couple on a subway platform, take comfort in closeness apart from the crowd. Others, find their measure in their distance. Two people follow the same curving path through a park, but neither may know that the other exists. In the closest DeCarava comes to a group photo, a long exposure reduces six dancers, including adults and children, to a blur. That woman at the march for civil rights looks isolated and afraid.

Last, black and white mean darkness and light—just as for the white male in a doorway and black woman in sunlight. Even in mid-solo, his cheeks puffed up by exertion, Coltrane sinks into darkness. Light floods Bearden's easel and outlines his gesture and his face. In the group photo, a young black man becomes almost a skeleton as in an x-ray, beside the fluttering white dresses of the little girls. In the dark silhouette of its neck, a black swan is, for once, no accident. It also embraces dozens of points of light.

Light and sound

For the curators, Sherry Turner DeCarava with Zoé Whitley, it all comes down to light and sound. DeCarava aimed throughout, they argue, for a visual equivalent to sound. They call the show's large Chelsea component "Light Break," while the gallery's uptown branch displays "the sound I saw"—both leaning heavily on the artist's estate. The sound part is easy. Even the first segment has more than a dozen jazz portraits, and the photographer himself chose the uptown title for an artist's book. It runs to a greater stylishness than the rest, not always to its credit, from female vocalists with expressive faces to audience shots. In this synesthesia, one can almost hear or feel the light.

That light was not just burning bright. DeCarava began as a painter and then printmaker, and he took up photography at first as a means toward painting as an end. He admired Vincent van Gogh and Diego Rivera. He felt the influence of older artists at Harlem, like Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Charles White. It shows in his tonal gradations, like the visual fabric of a sidewalk, and the richness of his grays. It shows in the morning sun on Wall Street or the underside of an elevated highway at night.

Once one starts looking, everything can be about light. DeCarava's titles speak of dark water, a traffic light in fog, and sun and shade. The water's ripples and reflections stand out from the darkness, and DeCarava made his own prints to ensure that he caught every one. His jazz portraits, in turn, challenge the viewer to make out their subject, just as an African American facing racism in America had to learn to see in the dark. Come to think of it, more than a few jazz musicians covered George Gershwin's "A Foggy Day." A jazz sound track plays continually in the gallery uptown.

DeCarava can miss out on something after all, the dark side of race. A painterly instinct always wins out over the documentary—and the celebratory over both pride and pain. Compared to Parks, he seems to have attended the Freedom March without really seeing it. Compared to photographers today like Paul Mpagi Sepuya and John Edmonds, he observed black flesh without concern for who else is looking. He lacks the scorching irony of a blond woman beside a black man holding a monkey for Garry Winogrand. For a black photographer who lived to 2009, just weeks short of age ninety, he can seem to belong to a distant past.

If DeCarava lacks irony, it is because he never lacks sympathy. If he seems too close to his subjects, he never forgets to measure the distance. If he seems awfully arty, it is he cared so much about art. (The gallery refers to Sherry Turner DeCarava only as an art historian, not as his longtime collaborator and his wife.) If he has become the official portraitist of the jazz age, he earned that title as well. It came just as composers like John Cage and Manfred Mohr, too, were working between the visual arts and sound.

DeCarava hit his stride only in the 1950s, as music was moving from swing to bebop and beyond. Duke Ellington looks suitably commanding and Dizzy Gillespie suitably engaged. Billie Halliday looks heartbreakingly young. Still, much of the show dates from within a year or two of 1960. In that short space of time, he moved freely between portraiture and the city and between realism and abstraction. They come down to the same project, in black and white.

Sex at a distance

Fresh out of the Navy, a kid from the Bronx came to a Manhattan pier in search of a community that never quite existed and a subject that his photographs could never capture. A segment of the elevated West Side Highway (since destroyed in its entirety) had collapsed in 1973, leaving the foot of Christopher Street brutally exposed, but also a magnet for queer identity, the gay homeless, and gay sex. Not that it offered much of a refuge to anyone, much less an African American, and Alvin Baltrop made it a record of distance, absence, and longing. The Bronx Museum calls his retrospective his "Life and Times," but it ends well before his death in 2004. It also leaves uncertain his very stature, but it is all the more poignant for that.

Absence may seem like the wrong word for a show that packs close to two hundred photos into a single long room. The museum draws on the artist's estate and private collections as well as its own. It displays two of his well-worn cameras and any number of his wallet IDs, and it has access as well to medical bills and records. (Baltrop was diabetic.) He also got a fast start, even before attending the School of Visual Arts from 1973 to 1975. The first wall picks him up in the Navy, and already something critical is left unseen.

Baltrop shows men at work and at rest. He shows black sailors like himself taunting the camera and white men as their legs and crotches, a far cry from the harbor series by Bruce Davidson on much the same piers. As a gay male among male bodies, like Gregg Bordowitz, and as a photographer, he was always aware of the human eye, and he hones in on eyes, including one behind its glasses. Later, too, his most immediate portraits stick to a face, with the leaden eyes of a man asleep and a rather garish black woman (or, more precisely, an activist and drag queen) in diamonds. What he does not show is combat. The Vietnam War had ended almost before his service began, but even so Baltrop made his choices.

Later, too, with only a brief foray into color, he retains the dry style and flat compositions of much photojournalism but with a near absence of journalism's subject. Even when he photographs a fire on the piers and police attending to a dead body, his shots of the crime scene have no clear sequence or drama, much less dates and titles. There is no one "decisive moment" or "Time Management Technique"—only an extended moment that will not relinquish its threat. There is no perfect moment, because the situation here seems irreparable. That could stem from Baltrop's esthetic, his deepest feelings, or his weakness as a photographer. Regardless, it is never indifferent.

Maybe you know the piers south of the Meatpacking District from photos by Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. Maybe you know them from projects by Gordon Matta-Clark (his Day's End, which Baltrop photographed) and, much later, David Hammons. Maybe you know glistening African American male bodies from Robert Mapplethorpe or the 2019 Whitney Biennial. None will prepare you for Baltrop's absence, here and in "Trust Me" at the Whitney. It is at its greatest in his earliest New York photographs, with hardly a person in sight. What may seem like merely his struggle with the camera, and so it may be, takes on a cumulative impact.

Artificial lighting at night or the glare of sunlight through an open door holds him at a distance. So do cars, rain, or the shadows that blacken a closed window. Only peeling floors, dense and derelict crossed beams, or ripples in the Hudson add texture, along with a sense of danger. The rare human being is almost always isolated, even in the occasional group. Some people expose their penis or primp like body-builders, and the museum speaks of their acts as "rituals." Even so, their gestures seem unrehearsed and unsatisfied.

If that reduces them to objects, it also allows them to engage Baltrop rather than one another. They and he may have come for illicit sex, but for now they have found only their own male gaze. In the mid-1970s, well before AIDS, a gay hook-up was not yet a matter of life and death. As with those shadowy eyes, the photographer is always looking and always finding his reflection. Maybe the fire reminded him of a ship on fire back in wartime. He saw that, too, from a less than safe distance.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Roy DeCarava ran at David Zwirner through October 26, 2019, Alvin Baltrop at the Bronx Museum through February 9, 2020.