NEWYORK OBSERVED THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE CITY FOREWORD This exhibition celebrates the City of New York through the eyes of photographers. New York and photography in America both came of age at the end of the nineteenth century. Not only had the City become the symbol of American progress, commerce, technology, and creativity, but as the dynamo of American culture it crystallized in stone, steel, and glass the achievements of the past century. New York’s size, its frantic pace of expansion incorporated into Greater New York in 1898, and its vertical expansion on the threshold of the twentieth century created a new kind of city. Settled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century as Nieuw Amsterdam, New York by the early twentieth century was no longer the European city it had been a century before. A bustling metropolis and the symbolic——as well as literal——port of entry for millions of immigrants, New York’s character had become international, cosmopolitan, and commercial——with a dynamic energy that made it a quintessentially American invention. The City remains strongly polyglot in character to the present day; one quarter of New York’s inhabitants are immigrants from distant shores. The mechanical aspects of photography led to debates in the late nineteenth century as to whether it could be considered an artistic medium on the level of painting and sculpture, or whether photography represented baser aims of imitation and commercial reproduction. This discussion came to the fore in New York with the arrival in 1890 of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Returning to the United States after study in Germany, Stieglitz championed photography’s expressive strengths Garry Winogrand, American, 1928–1984 New York City 1968, 1968, gelatin silver print as a new medium, fashioning Old World aesthetics Gift of Stanley T. Lesser, A.B. 1951, J.D. 1953 of pictorial photography, with its picturesque © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, qualities and pastoral subject matter, into an idiom Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, SF peculiarly American. Taking the City as their sub- opposite: John Francis Strauss, active 1900–1920s ject, Stieglitz’s early soft-focus portrayals of the city detail of The Bridge, from Camera Work, 1903, skyline and grand avenues differed from those of photogravure on Japan tissue his slightly older contemporary in Paris, Eugène Gift of the Marvin Felheim Collection Atget. Beautiful and elegiac, Atget’s photographs front cover: Berenice Abbott 1898–1991 looked with an antiquarian’s eye at the disappear- detail of Village Square, gelatin silver print ing features of that European capital, whereas Gift of Harry H. Lunn, Jr. the photographers working in New York were fascinated with the burgeoning metropolis. Stieglitz himself, abandoning the aesthetic of pictorialism, opted instead for direct, unmanipulated images of the City, an approach that became known as “straight photography.” Throughout the twentieth century photogra- phers working in the City formed a synergetic relationship to their subject. The City was new—— growing by leaps and bounds——and photography’s instantaneity captured the evanescent features of New York and New Yorkers. As stately mansions and brownstones gave way to the skyscrapers that came to dominate New York’s skyline, the aims Halsted of the Halsted Gallery. Not only were they and aesthetics of photographers adapted to and willing to part with their important photographs built upon those changes. The approaches taken for the exhibition, but all of them also graciously by the photographers represented in the present gave that most precious commodity——their time. exhibition were as varied as their subjects. Ian Reed Twiss and Nicholas Delbanco from the Berenice Abbott, a fierce admirer of Atget, under- Master’s Program in Creative Writing, Department took an immense project to record New York’s of English Language and Literature at the changing face and scale. Helen Levitt’s and Roy University of Michigan, have been ideal partners DeCarava’s lyrical images forged sensitive connec- throughout this project. They were instrumental tions to the neighborhoods of New York, complete in engaging Phillip Lopate as the essayist for the with their subtle relationships and intimate sense gallery guide, as well as arranging for Mr. Lopate of belonging to a particular locale. Motivated by to speak in Ann Arbor during the run of the social inequalities and concern for the welfare of exhibition. Finally, the assistance of staff in sister its inhabitants, Walter Rosenblum and Dan Weiner institutions helped secure critical loans from local followed in the steps of Jacob Riis and Lewis collections. My sincere thanks to Clayton Lewis Wickes Hine in portraying the grittier aspects of at the William L. Clements Library, the University urban life. For street photographers such as Garry of Michigan, as well as Nancy Sojka and Michelle Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, and Elliott Erwitt, the Peplin at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Julie incongruity of modern life can be caught on the Mellby and Patricia A. Whitesides at the Toledo fly——often with tremendous wit. It is appropriate Museum of Art for their kind assistance. that New York’s commercial, cultural, and artistic energy has been recorded in all its many facets by Carole McNamara the gifted photographs of the past 100 years on Assistant Director for Exhibitions and Collections view in this exhibition. I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Phillip Lopate for the excellent and thoughtful essay featured in this publication. His extensive knowledge of photography is wedded to a life-long love of his native New York in a beautifully written essay on the importance of New York to the serious photographer. This exhibition benefited from the generosity of a select group of lenders. My warm thanks go to Lois and Bruce Zenkel, Margaret and Howard Bond, Mrs. Morris Baker, and Wendy and Thomas NEWYORK OBSERVED PHILLIP LOPATE New York has been the most photogenic views of an ascendant, prosperous metropolis. of subjects. It has sat patiently and obligingly, Much as “sun and shadow” guidebooks all allowing its portrait to be snapped by through the nineteenth century had helped amateurs and professionals, hacks and artists, to codify the city’s wonders while titillating oblivious to the winnowing hand of taste that readers with its secret vices and miseries, so would select a few dozen of its devotees as postcard photographers, such as Byron, also master photographers, worthy of collection took views of the ghettos––the Lower East Side, and display in a museum exhibit such as this with its pushcarts and teeming Hassidic one. New York’s rise to prominence as a world humanity, or Chinatown, with its seemingly city coincided with the birth and ensuing exotic queue-wearers. But they were a far cry universality of photography; and the image from the second type of photography, initiated the world retains of New York, from Duluth by Jacob Riis, which produced hard-hitting to Dubai, owes almost everything to the documentary images, meant to discomfit photographic lens. the viewer and expose grave social ills. Riis At the beginning there were two principal wanted his photographs of Lower East Side types of New York photographs: tourist views slum-dwellers, crammed into dirty, tubercular and social documents. The first, largely hovels, to change social conditions, and they composed of stereoscopes and postcards, left did in fact lead to a reform tenement law. us an invaluable record of the most celebrated We might include in that Riis tradition Paul landmarks of late nineteenth and turn-of-the- Strand’s blind woman, Lewis Hine’s workers, century New York: Central Park, the Brooklyn and the proletarian street scenes taken by Bridge, City Hall, Fifth Avenue. These pictures members of the Photo League (Sid Grossman, were for the most part straightforward, arti- Walter Rosenbaum, Ben Shahn). sanal visual mementos, broad vistas practicing In Berenice Abbott we see a struggle a naïve deep focus. In the early twentieth between the documentary and the formalist, century, some members of the more artistically abstract impulse. Following in the footsteps self-conscious “pictorial” school, such as of her Paris exemplar, Eugène Atget, she set Alvin Langdon Coburn or Karl Struss, would out to assemble a typology of streets and try to bring a glow of subjective poetry to neighborhoods, at a time when New York the Brooklyn Bridge or Pennsylvania Station. was undergoing a major tearing-down and Alfred Stieglitz would take his famous construction phase. Her shots of skyscrapers Impressionist-style photograph of the from above accentuate the negative space horse on Fifth Avenue, but it still had to be between buildings, in dizzying, Cubist compo- Fifth Avenue. sitions, while her photographs of streets taken These were essentially composed, stately at eye level seem intent on capturing a homely, small-townish New York about to vanish. Much of the best New York photography is street photography. This is partly because the New York street represents a powerfully unifying public realm, understood and shared by all. The clarity of its gridded layout encour- ages wandering on foot, and indeed, New York remains one of the few “walking cities” in America. The vitality of its street life partly derives from cosmopolitan demographics: the infusion of immigrants and visitors from everywhere in the world. But there is also–– perhaps more important for a photography discussion––the particular built environment of New York: its siting as a port city, which offers vistas of escape in the distance, along its waterfront edges, contradicted by its middle, which is densely, almost claustro- phobically, bounded by edifices. The grid system, particularly in Manhattan, offers an orthogonal frontality to the camera eye, one square format imposed on another. Building block, sidewalk, street––add people to the mix, and you have the X-ray of a million New York photographs.