Though you've never met them, you probably already know, in some sense, the guys pictured in Helen Levitt's 1940 photograph New York City — two friends seated on a pair of chairs on a city sidewalk. The world ticks by as they kibitz about world affairs or subway fares; a horse-drawn carriage stenciled with the logo of a laundry service clops down the street, passing a poster advertising canned soup.
Naked City: Photography from Vassar College's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, an exhibition on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through Saturday, bares the personalities of city life — both the individual characters who populate cities and the strange-but-loveable personalities of the cities themselves.
Collectively, the more than 40 photographs in the show — snapped by such noted 20th-century photographers as Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Andy Warhol and Weegee (a.k.a., Arthur Fellig, whose seminal 1945 book of street photographs lends the exhibition its title) — constitute a love letter to urban life. For the visitor looking back 20, 60 or more than 100 years through them, the images also offer a kind of time travel into phenomena both familiar and foreign.
Let's start a little closer to home, timewise, with a pair of portraits by Jerry Thompson of punk rockers from the 1980s. One image shows a young man in shredded jeans and combat boots posed in front of a graffiti-tagged stoop in New York's East Village. The other captures a woman wearing thick black eyeliner and a homemade, cropped tank top — cut, by the looks of it, out of an old t-shirt and covered with mottoes like "just glide" and "tap the pulse." I'd almost forgotten what the real '80s looked like (they've been displaced in my memory by the Urban Outfitters simulacrum), but these images take me back to a time when it was possible to feel some vestige of countercultural sentiment without irony.
Other characters — Frank Paulin's photographs of a barefoot girl on a New Orleans street (1952) and a portly man in a donut shop (1951); Diane Arbus' pro-Vietnam War demonstrator (a young man dressed in a suit and bow tie, 1967); and Rineke Dijkstra's Wall Street yuppies (women in pantyhose and pumps, 1993) — serve as reminders of a deep and abiding pleasure of city living: the cognitive dissonance of being surrounded by people who are different from you but with whom you share the bond of the place where you live.
This exhibition is a love letter to New York — no surprise, perhaps, given Vassar's proximity to the Big Apple. But other burgs do come into focus in a handful of images, like Harry Callahan's modernist odes to Chicago apartment buildings. A pair of his black-and-white photographs (both taken in 1949) offers a taste of architectural physiognomy — an austere brick façade contrasting in character with a building face of white stone.
In one of the exhibition's most striking photographs, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia's Michael Jenson, 19, Dallas, Texas, $40 (1990-1992), a young man — who, we're led to understand by his inclusion in DiCorcia's series, works as a prostitute — sits in a bus shelter etched with graffiti scratches, waiting for a customer. Somehow his dismal surroundings seem complicit in his oppression.
The exhibit's devotion to New York is impressive for its range and diversity of images. There's Nan Goldin's 1991 portrait — like DiCorcia and Dijkstra's works, one of the '90s color photography gems in the show — of Jimmy Paulette, a young man dressed in drag, after the city's Gay Pride parade. That image is distinctly of its post-Stonewall, life-after-AIDS era, while photographs like Brett Weston's New York Bridge (1947) highlight the city's timelessness. Weston's image frames the Brooklyn Bridge from the waterfront corner of Old Fulton Street, a site that looks a lot today like it did 60-plus years ago.
My favorite photographs in the show are the oldest — a handful of pictures by an anonymous photographer (or photographers) that show New York as we know it being born at the turn of the century. Construction of the train tracks that now course through the heart of the city at Grand Central is the subject of 4th Avenue and 42nd Street (1900), while Cortlandt and Broadway (1904) documents a growing commercial district downtown.
What's striking about many of these century- or half-century-old photographs — e.g., Berenice Abbott's skyline of the South Street seaport (1936) — is their luscious detail. The oldest platinum prints in the exhibition offer up a good picture, but Abbott's skyline or Andreas Feininger's Traffic on Fifth Avenue (1948), in which it is possible to examine the individual faces in a crowd of pedestrians, are mind-blowing for their silver gelatin resolution. If you're one of those people who's never understood all the fuss about the obsolescence of film, this exhibition might make you a true believer in the medium.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2011.