New York After Dark

John Haber
in New York City

Herman Leonard, Kahlil Joseph, and Petrit Halilaj

Dan and Sandra Weiner

If you had the chance to take in New York before it vanishes before your eyes, you could hardly do better than to call on Herman Leonard and Kahlil Joseph. True, this New York does not have much daylight, and what it has is blinding. You might not even know nine times out of ten where you are. It does, though, come with a real commitment to music—and to places that have already become history. It is African American New York, with people who know it inside and out.

Leonard's photographs say all you need to know about the people making jazz after World War II. Joseph circles in and around Harlem today to more frenetic rhythms—unless he turns out instead to be circling in and around his head. Things are changing, no doubt, and change is not altogether bad, provided anyone is left to enjoy the benefits. If you have your doubts about that part, so does he. Ironically, Joseph is also part of gentrification on the Lower East Side, sharing a museum expansion with Petrit Halilaj and a record of displacement and war in Eastern Europe, but the irony would not be lost on either one. Is it still the vintage New York of Dan and Sandra Weiner as well?

Listening hard and looking good

Sometimes, they say, jazz had to set aside image in order to make music. Sometimes it had just those late nights in small spaces when no one was mugging for the camera. From the jagged intensity of bebop to the reserve of cool, this was serious business. Then again, that, too, was an image, and no one made it as indelibly as Herman Leonard. "The Rhythm of Old New York" shows the photographer at work starting in the late 1940s. It also shows musicians in the act and, the show's catchy title notwithstanding, never more modern.

Maybe jazz never lost its glamour, but many said it had, proudly. As big bands gave way to small groups, the case goes, jazz could set aside star power for tight ensembles and a direct connection with listeners. Musicians could disappear into their music—or a cloud of cigarette smoke. They could be overweight and on drugs, like Charlie Parker, or downright hostile to the uninitiated, like Miles Davis. They could break the color barrier in their acts. Stars like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman could take time out from the Apollo Theater and Carnegie Hall to sit in the audience, because it was the place to be.

Leonard makes the case himself. He asks not how they party, but how they perform. Sara Vaughn is seated in rehearsal, and Parker and Davis are just the start of a front line coming right at you. Buddy Rich is here as not a bandleader but a drummer in close-up, pouring it on. When they pause, like Dizzy Gillespie with a smile or Gerry Mulligan for a kiss, they have earned it. Tony Bennett hugs his mike like a loved one, and Chet Baker collapses into his trumpet, because he can do no more.

Not that many were as dapper as Bennett, Nat King Cole, or a young Frank Sinatra, and Leonard plays that up as well. The marquee at Bop City, with Artie Shaw above Ella Fitzgerald, is pretty sexy, too. The photos thrive on artificial lighting, the kind that turns night into day and day into night. They linger on the highlights of loosened shirt sleeves or that ubiquitous cigarette smoke. Even so, they subordinate the performer to the performance. Davis becomes mere hands on the valves of a trumpet, and a cigarette butt for Lester Young rests on an empty Coke bottle beside sheet music and his hat.

They marked the birth of an American art form, much like Abstract Expressionist New York in much the same years, and visual artists found a home in performance, too. Think of Robert Rauschenberg and dance, Jasper Johns and John Cage, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman on cello, Pop Art and the jukebox, formalism and free jazz, or African American art and Afrofuturism. Maybe a new generation had new standards for what is hot and cool. Leonard's photo of Fats Navarro for the Blue Note reissue series helped introduce a rock fan like me to jazz. Then again, maybe jazz and rock have had much the same standards all along. Goodman was the king of swing, but Eric Clapton was god.

One can dismiss Leonard as mere packaging, just when photography was finding an America beyond cool—like Danny Lyon in a Texas prison, Magnum photography at an antiwar protest, Gordon Parks in the South, or Robert Frank on the road. No matter. The glamour holds up, and so does the seriousness. Goodman sits behind Ellington to hear Ella Fitzgerald at the Downbeat Club, just as he integrated his big band because he cared less about approval than about making justice and making music. He sat in one of the bars on 52nd Street, like W. H. Auden on September 1, 1939, but unlike the poet he was anything but "uncertain and afraid." He was listening hard and looking good.

Coming all too soon

A museum is expanding south from the Lower East Side into Harlem, with a stop in Kosovo along the way. If the geography sounds implausible, the New Museum has taken over the building next door for a renovation by Rem Koolhaas—and, for now, two galleries accessible through the existing lobby. The first has a tale of archaeological excavations in Eastern Europe, by Petrit Halilaj. And the second has an artist's commitment to jazz, family, and neighborhood, by Kahlil Joseph. A window display by Alex Da Corte allows them the enclosed spaces they deserve. In an era of museum expansions and corporate aspirations, its sign after a chain of convenience stores (with a digital Coming Soon) looks downright ominous.

Does the New Museum need to expand after just ten years on the Bowery? Its awkward stacked boxes, designed by SANAA, already bring exhibitions to five floors, on a par with the Met Breuer or the Whitney. (A show on the floor for education conveys its history in posters, including past provocations and past homes on lower Fifth Avenue, in Soho, and in Chelsea.) The new spaces, hardly touched as yet, look even more inflexible. Many a gallery has put more into a renovation—or into preserving the architecture that they found. All this for an alternative museum of contemporary art.

Both new shows are all about property, community, and ownership. Halilaj's RU refers to Runik, a town in Kosovo, and to ruins. Both may have one thinking of Serbia, war crimes, and disputed territory, but the installation takes a longer view. Maybe it needs a deep history to assert a republic's claim to legitimacy and rebirth. One enters to low light and many video channels, each recording a dig. They look less scientific than anarchic.

The facing wall presents branches devoid of leaves—and then, surprise: it opens onto a larger and brighter realm. There the branches form forests, nests, and the illusion of a catch pool, thanks to a mirror. The promised pottery from the digs, going back well before the Kosovo War, takes shape as its life, sometimes with makeshift bird feet. The actual digs turned up a primitive ocarina, implicitly present here as a bird song. Their finds reside mostly in museum storage, but Halilaj can hope to carry them into daylight.

Joseph's Harlem has still fewer signs of place, but it is an artist's home ground. Fly Paper moves between city streets without visible markers, a sunlit park, and ill-defined interiors. The film also tunnels beneath them all, where even subway riders fear to tread. It switches back and forth between saturated color and black and white. Its soundtrack alternates jazz with quieter music before rising again to a chorus. It closes in on a furious drummer, waits patiently for the words of a black activist, and pulls back from a man alone in a loft.

It returns to him often, and the memories may be his. So for sure are the hopes of African American identity, and so is the disorientation as the camera turns the loft nearly upside down. A voice interrupts with uncertainty and defiance: "if they don't see the happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the blackness." Joseph cites inspiration in his father and in Roy DeCavara, who photographed jazz musicians and street life uptown, the kind that Jason Moran still evokes in his stage sets. He may intend that the film lies past an empty space much like the loft—just one more part of a museum expansion.

Together in the city

Just what brought these people together across from the United Nations, and what holds their attention off to the side? What about the people leaning out a tenement window or sharing the stoop? Dan Weiner is not saying, but then it may not matter. He does not deal in mysteries, least of all the wider world outside the photo. For him, what matters is that they are together, active, and engaged. For him, too, that activity and engagement defines the city.

For him and his wife, Sandra Weiner, people belonged to New York and New York to its people. Raised on a steady diet of social activism and Depression-era photography, they joined the Photo League in 1940 with Paul Strand, W. Eugene Smith, Aaron Siskind, and Dorothea Lange to continue that merger of street photography and photojournalism. For them, photography could never be simply either one. They worked in hungry neighborhoods, he in Yorkville on the Upper East Side and she on East 26th Street, but with few particulars of politics, employment, and need. They shot people in their habitat, but with little sense of a decisive moment, a decisive personal character, or a stranger apart from the crowd. Their subjects take to the streets to find themselves and each other.

His "Vintage New York" ended in 1958, the year before his death in a plane crash on assignment. Her "New York Kids" occupied her through the 1940s. Theirs was not the glamorous or exclusive city of the jazz era for Herman Leonard then or Warhol's Factory for Steven Shore later. It was not the city of loners for Diane Arbus, although Garry Winogrand confessed to admiring its felt spontaneity. When Dan Weiner photographs student teachers, they could be taking the measure of the projects behind them, but they are only casing out the playground for their kids. There is not a basketball hoop, slide, or seesaw in sight—not just because these were harsher times, but also because here what creates a public space is its people.

A pool hall or a newsstand serves as a gathering place, while a subway station is a point of frantic transition. Times Square is not a freak show, but a place to celebrate New Year's Eve. People in the sand at Brighton Beach cling obsessively to each other. Women meet on the sidewalk to gesticulate impatiently, while their dogs lie down to wait until it is over. Just once, the tiny shadow of a man walks alone by the river, but Weiner returns in winter to that exact same spot to capture others in the snow. They walk together, and they will soon be gone.

He never takes a subject out of the moment. His wife often does, in a smaller show, and it hurts. She photographs children at play, with hardly a grownup in sight. Does that mean freedom—or a shortage of comfort zones and direction? The kids mostly slump, as if too tired to play or distracted by the camera. And then they look up, singly, in an act of mutual recognition, with longing in their eyes.

"Vintage New York" makes a point of nostalgia, in its selection as well as its title. I want to believe that Arbus or Joel Meyerowitz documents my New York, where I grew up, but this is the one into which I was born. I may never remember it, but nostalgia has its limits. Sandra Weiner largely escapes nostalgia, and she deserves the greater credit for it—but still her husband also worked abroad and in the emerging civil-rights movement in Alabama, and one can see why. The movement was, after all, a coming together to gain recognition from others outside the frame. Those photos do not appear here, but their promise points to his work's character and its strengths.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Herman Leonard ran at Robert Mann through October 14, 2017. Petrit Halilaj and Kahlil Joseph ran at the New Museum through January 7, 2018, Dan and Sandra Weiner at Steven Kasher through July 28. The museum expansion started September 27, 2017.