Bill Cunningham New York

After moving to New York City in 1981, one of the first people I began to recognize with frequency was a slim man on a bicycle, with a camera who would seem to be just about anywhere at any given time, transversing downtown, Midtown, the Upper East Side, etc.

I don't know when I became aware that this fellow, looking boyish and agile, with fine bones & smooth hair, was Bill Cunningham; nor do I remember when I became aware of his photo spreads in the New York Times. In those lean pre-internet days, the hefty Sunday edition would be a weekly weekend ritual: going out to get the paper to go with my morning coffee;  and when I lived in the Lower East Side, picking up a bagel with cream cheese at a place nearby on Essex Street, to eat while looking through it. Bill Cunningham's spreads would be about fashion trends, although identifying them strictly as fashion does not really describe them at all: there's an anthropological delight at work in finding commonalities in the chaos of urban crowds, making structural comparisons. In the numbing din of an urban setting there is great attention and focus, and a sense of life in movement.

Cunningham worked elsewhere too: in the Annie Flanders iteration of Details, for Women's Wear Daily - all of that was off my radar, although I did look at Details in those days, which was like a report from the then edgy East Village.

The photographs themselves are deceivingly artless: done with a telephoto lens, or cropped to emphasize a particular item, there's no apparent photographer directing the images. These are not quite surveillance photographs, what we see are an archive of fragments of life passing on the streets, from an ambiguously neutral position, fashion-reportage from the "field." There is a sense of the street as a living theater of display.

This idea of the street as shared theater came out of the industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century, in the revocation of sumptuary laws, and the blurring of social positions in the upheavals of modernity.  The invention of photography offered a scientific mirror of resemblances which could also, in apparent paradox, conceal meaning too. In the Poe story The Man of the Crowd,  the narrator, seeing a stranger, shadowing the stranger as if to unpack his secret (what secret?), leads to no conclusions except exhaustion and an uneasy truce with un-knowing.

Bill Cunningham's photos could be seen as our equivalent of Baudelaire's distinctions about the temporal beauty that comprises the work of Constantin Guys: a delight in the moment which has no shelf life in itself, transposed into the frieze of modern life. In the case of Cunningham and the New York Times, in the modernist layouts of the newspaper, this also touches on scrapbooking, motion studies, and collage.

The idea of being in public also seems in eclipse in the world we live in. Is Bill Cunningham a valiant knight of modernity in this sense? Holding up a collage of dandyism that is for both ourselves and others? Do people feel like they are even outside anymore or is the street simply a movement from one inside to another?

The Richard Press film Bill Cunningham New York is an amazing window into the milieu of Bill Cunningham, his daily work, and the range of his world, from photo lab to diner to New York Times to  rarified social orbits to his studio in Carnegie Hall.

In his ubiquity on the streets, on his bicycle, looking refined yet never imposing, Bill Cunningham is able to render himself more or less invisible. This lack of aggression is the opposite of classic street photography, in which there is a downright macho approach to the idea of being outside, among others, with an individual, alienated, abstracted camera frame at the foreground. Bill Cunningham comes off as a Fred Astaire figure - graceful, charming, humorous, attentive. The gestures and postures of those photographed are rendered with as close a photographic objectivity as possible. What keeps this from being machine-like is Cunningham's sensitivity to fashion, to display, and attraction.

The film is also a great document of the kinds of lives which could be lived in New York City that are now becoming obsolete in the harsh economic shifts of our present day, whether as an artist or "jobber" in the Fashion District. Seeing the studios of both Cunningham and Editta Sherman in Carnegie Hall should remind everyone that we are living in a shrinking, regulated world of less in our daily lives. Cunningham exemplifies thrift in some respects - the uniform-like nature of his clothes, his basic cot surrounded by file cabinets and books, his diner and take-out meals - he also has a measure of freedom which he attributes to living without money, which in so many ways seems impossible now except in terms of being homeless.

In the tapestry of dandyism, high society, and journalism detailed in the film, at the onset Cunningham mentions the work of Japanese designers in the 1980s, in particular Rei Kawakubo, looking at the homeless as inspiration for her work. This is also mentioned in one of the essays in John Waters' Role Models. Cunningham's mention is a weird flash, as it were, in what seems a fairly stable social fabric, even if Cunningham's eviction from Carnegie Hall is part of the narrative, which when mentioned in the film Cunningham responds with stoic indifference. Cunningham is a figure of constant paradox: a shy person who lives entirely in public events; a very sharp observant person who has little to say for himself. The difference may be partially generational, but I think we also live in a culture wherein disclosure of the self can lead to as much as "smokescreen" of concealment as saying little or nothing. The words we use enclose a subject rather than liberate it.

Beyond the interest in Cunningham that drives the film, I want to point out some of the virtues of the film itself, primarily its simplicity and its discretion.

 Near the end Cunningham is asked if he ever had a love in his life. "Do you mean 'Am I gay?'" Cunningham asks back, to which he adds that that is what his family feared - beyond that Cunningham didn't answer the question. I feared the film would lapse into a sort of emotional breakdown, a la the end of Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason or any Barbara Walters interview, but it veers away from any resolution beyond that awkward moment. What we see as we saw throughout the film is the oblique independence Cunningham and his devotion to his work. That gives a moral lesson beyond our contemporary world of stage-crafted personalities. The film ends with a birthday party at the New York Times with the crew singing a parody of the song "Kids" from Bye-Bye Birdie, transposed to "Bill" which includes the refrain "and you always get your way!" Enough said there.

Leon Levinstein at the Metropolitan Museum

A gift of a large collection of prints by Leon Levinstein is the basis for a very intriguing summer show in the Howard Gilman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. Levinstein's images appear in anthologies about Coney Island, or vintage (post WWII) street photography in New York, but never in a way that foregrounds his work. One image in particular, a very modernist composition of the back of handball players in the Lower East Side, which has an almost Bauhaus formality to it seems to be the most reproduced, but it gives little indication of the salty character studies which distinguish his images, primarily. The modernist compositions can seem related to the lightning-reflexes of someone like Henri Cartier-Bresson, also the sense of the image passing into a scarily iconic passage which can also border on morbid caricature. & yet unlike Cartier-Bresson in which the remarkable composition seemingly unearthed by the camera has a redemptive, essentialist "Family of Man" aspect - the same skill set in Levinstein's hands reveals a much more misanthropic & isolated social perspective.

Levinstein is much closer to the likes of the Poe story The Man of the Street: looking at others in puzzlement which leads to a journey which reveals nothing, ultimately. A wild goose chase into unknowing. This kind of forlorn &, in 20th century terms, existential confrontation with other-ness is perhaps the ultimate theme of most post WWII street photography. The chaos of the streets, the lack of solution, as it were, for what seems random, endless & jarring, is both the horror & appeal of such work. The closest equivalent I can think of is the work of William Klein, but even Klein has an ecstatic aspect in his expressive printing methods & his dynamic book designs, whereas Leon Levinstein presents a portfolio which reverberates with loneliness & despair, with little redemption beyond that. Perhaps a torso or butt which may excite some erotic intrigue, somewhat. The most appealing (if one needs the images to be appealing) aspects border on figures which may or not be of a somewhat outlaw nature. Levinstein worked from the 1950s through the 1970s & one can see social aspects which are almost nonexistent in pre-1968 street photography: hippies, bag ladies (one of the sickest moments in 1970s pop culture were the cretins who made postcards of NYC bag ladies as comical gross figures), inter-racial relations which would have had a different emphasis before the civil rights movement, figures outside any normative formations - no one in his images is ordinary looking yet all seem utterly an everyman or everywoman.

One can see a pre-gentrified New York City in Levinstein's images which now can read as much nostalgic as they could be conceived of as harsh. Glimpses of this can be seen in films such as The Panic in Needle Park (which was at 72nd & Broadway!) & Serpico. This "olde" New York is always in black-&-white. It reached its apogee in William Klein, Diane Arbus, Sid Grossman, Weegee, Peter Sekaer, Rudy Burckhardt, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, That's such a small list - there have been recent historical shows such as "The Women of the Photo League" exhibit put together by Kim Bouros at Higher Pictures last year which reveal much wider practices at hand, & a future task for the photo historian.

Housed at the Alice Austen House

The Alice Austen House in Staten Island is the former home of the Victorian photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), which had belonged to her family & which bears the name Clear Comfort. The house was built initially in the 17th century but was updated through the mid-19th century. It is a "gothic cottage" on a lawn sloping down to New York Bay, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which links Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with Staten Island.

The Austen house is absurdly pastoral & quaint in a city not usually known for such aspects. I walked from the ferry terminal in St. George, which took about an hour, & passed through different communities as well as strip malls, industrial areas & areas of such oblique nature I was reminded of the Rem Koolhaas essay "Junkspace."

At the end of long lonely industrial street I walked there was a short fence & sloping lawns & trees & in the midst there sits the white clapboard house, smaller than I expected. The ceilings are low, & the rooms are kept as a museum of Alice Austen's everyday, although Austen in her lifetime lost her family money in the 1929 stock market crash & died in 1952 in a poor house, called the Staten Island Farm Colony. Austen lived with her companion Gertrude Tate (1871-1962) in the house from 1917 until they were forced to move.

The discreet tact of the term "companionship" between Austen & Tate, the impossibility of knowing its exact nature, yet seeming quite clear as a loving relationship (unconsummated old maids? or a Boston Marriage?) informs a very sweet small show of photographs in the house for the summer, entitled Housed, curated by Joseph Maida & Katie Murray. The two key images in the show are a modern print of an Austen image of 2 girls in masks, lighting a cigarette together, dressed in underwear, which is next to a contemporary image by Catherine Opie of a drawing of a house with 2 stick figure women outside it, cut into her back.

There are thousands of negatives extant from the Austen estate. Many of the images are reportage of Staten Island & New York City. Austen also photographed private events. The images are a curious window into times past & unknown social circles. The images are remarkably candid. I find the party images the most interesting as they show a great deal of spontaneity & also a very direct engagement w/ the camera as a thing, as part of a social practice. Most fascinating of all are her staged images, which the masked girls could be considered part of, as well as a series of Austen & her girl friends dressed as men & posing as such. These are remarkably earthy & casual & seem much more modern than studio portraiture or art photography of that time.

The very subtle exhibit, Housed, touches on the idea of the "home" as a kind of private theater of shifting identities & perimeters. In addition to the Austen & Opie images, the other resonant image for me in construing a theme for the show is one of Peter Garfield's images of a destroyed house flying in the air (falling, I am assuming, like the house in The Wizard of Oz - or in the context of the show, a conventional house rent from its foundation, spinning in the ether). Or perhaps it is Peter Stanglmayr's fashion photo of a "girlie-boy" - a very pretty androgynous boy posing for a knitwear company's catalog. These images all show both a sense of an imposed social order & its transformation, for whatever needs that may arise (& these can remain oblique even if they seem very apparent). This is an invigorating show in a truly wonderful setting. All of us at the opening, sitting on the porch w/ a cooler of chilled rose (thanks to Peter Stanglmayr), with people playing badminton & croquet on the lawns, while ships passed in & out of the bay, below - we all commented that we wanted to live there. The Austen house is truly cozy. I found the house such a generous site & so lovely. It's something to think about. A refuge in the general storm of life.

The simultaneous visibility & invisibility of the Austen/Tate household reminded me of other such examples in the realm of photography. There are remarkable images of the actress Charlotte Cushman by Matthew Brady and Southworth & Hawes which are of remarkable gravity & presence, as strong as any of the other "great Americans" photographed by either firm. What is also apparent is Cushman's self-possession & lack of "feminine" mask. & in the 20th century, while working as a portrait photographer in Paris, Berenice Abbott photographed a remarkable array of "Sapphic" characters from the upper classes & artistic spheres. Abbott herself would not associate herself with lesbian feminist groups in the 1970s when approached for support (& also a sense of historical continuity) - despite her long-term household with the photo historian Elizabeth McCausland. I have heard the same of Djuna Barnes, who is the same generation as Abbott, & also a subject of remarkable photographs by Abbott taken in Paris in the 1920s. & the writer I knew in the 1980s, Marguerite Young, by then elderly & outspoken, would nevertheless deliberately obscure her sexual orientation & in fact criticize others (I recall a conversation in which Iris Murdoch was referred to as a bull-dyke, in an emphatically pejorative moment, & she would use the term fairies to describe some men, while always surrounded by a coterie of gay friends).

My former student L., who defines herself emphatically as a "butch dyke," would say "My kind are invisible, but it's not like we're not there." While not quite a contradiction of the inequalities & prejudices of the world we live in, the Alice Austen Houses of the world show us a much more diverse planet, nevertheless.

Robin Graubard, The Hold Up

Robin Graubard's current exhibition at Participant is an invigorating and expressive exploration of an eclectic range of photographic work. Graubard's images were made both professionally, as a working photojournalist, and photos done for private purposes - one would assume. No information is offered as to the origins of the work, which is one of its great strengths: the photos are displayed in informal groupings, without the linear narrative of a news or personal story. Instead the gallery is more like a box in which photos are kept randomly. We can bring different associations to the images, but they will not explain themselves to us.

The play between recognition and lack of knowledge is a profound aspect to looking at photographs. We see & don't know. Tallies of the contents of the work include: homelessness or squatting, youth culture, music, downtown NYC before gentrification, crime, wars in the Balkans, suburban domesticity, drugs - but making such a list does not reveal much at all. Nor can we know Graubard's involvement - as a paid professional or participant (excuse the pun).

I am impressed with how the show deals with news photography, which in some ways is truly ephemeral. Unattached to a crisis as it occurs in the virtual present tense of media, what is it? We can look at 19th century Civil War photography like the work of Mathew Brady or Alexander Gardner in a comfortable, distanced way, & see it on a museum wall, where it becomes art, as an aesthetic consideration. & likewise at MoMA we can see "iconic" images by W. Eugene Smith of World War II. What becomes imperative in looking at Smith isn't necessarily the situations, but the superlative darkroom technique, the liberal use artistic compositional strategies to make a point.

Looking at Robin Graubard's installation I am struck by what seems to me a very sensitive poignancy in conflating both the "outer" world of media & the "inner" tensions of a private world - it's a model of the shifting levels of consciousness, which we tend to overlook in our overlooked drawers & shoeboxes, of the ephemera we forget but which tells much more than anticipated.