Capturing a City’s Character and Life

Cities can have lives of their own—and New York City is no doubt a living entity, as a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art proves.

Obviously conceived of in the wake of this autumn’s attacks, Life of the City attempts to capture the atmosphere of New York both before and after the devastation. Yet it cannot help but fail at this—it was organized entirely afterwards, and the mood of the present necessarily strikes ironic sentiments into much of the past.

Life of the City, a three-part exhibit, endeavors to portray New York City from a multitude of photographic perspectives. The first part, comprised of photographs culled from the museum’s permanent collection, surveys more than a century of photography in and of New York. A rotating display of photographs contributed by residents of and visitors to the city comprises the second section, and the final third consists of a cinematic presentation of work taken from Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, a project carried out by volunteers who collected photographs of the events and the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.

Although at first glance the exhibit does not seem to present a cohesive front, the dynamic between the three parts is fascinating. After establishing the iconography of New York City in the first part, the second component reaches into the homes and daily lives of the people of New York. Part three then shows the impact of the destruction of one of the city’s own greatest icons on the lives of its people and the atmosphere of the city itself.

The themes of part one define New York in an almost clichéd fashion. Images of skyscrapers, baseball, high society, race, gender, sexuality, art and immigration pervade the mostly black and white prints in this section. The artists are about evenly divided between American and foreign born photographers, but nearly all spent significant amounts of time in New York City. These artists are expert seers and expert New Yorkers—and both facets show through in these works. Although the themes may be tired, few of the actual images are. This is due, in part, to the efforts of the featured artists; partially, however, it is because of the manifold meanings that each of these images has grown to hold in our minds over the past few months.

Edward Steichen’s 1932 photograph “The Maypole” depicts the Empire State Building at the height of its glory. The building, captured both frontally and cater-cornered, is printed from the two perspectives simultaneously, the straight shot superimposed over the isometric one. The angled shot shows the Empire State Building as the greatest point in New York City, almost as humanity’s greatest achievement, a holy mountain and an idol. It is the “maypole” around which the revelers of New York City heralded the modern era. The straight image, though, sets a tone of evanescence: It is not wholly opaque, and clouds appear to pass through it. What seems so permanent from one perspective becomes fleeting when viewed from another.

“Above Fifth Avenue, Looking North,” a 1905 print by Underwood & Underwood, depicts a man with a camera sitting precariously at the intersection of two steel beams above Fifth Avenue. Carriages stream uptown on the street below him. The tallest building, superimposed against a bright sky in the distance, does not exceed twenty stories. The central figure, the cameraman, looks west, but the actual photographer looks north. But in some sense the fictional and real artists actually gaze towards the future of New York City.

In Abelardo Morell’s 1994 photograph “Camera Obscura Image of the Empire State Building in Bedroom,” midtown Manhattan hangs upside down. The building of focus perches like a sleeping bat, suspended from the ceiling; its spire rests on a cot’s downy comforter. The sun glints off an upper-story window. A full-length mirror on the door of the room wraps the building as if around a corner, lending it a three-dimensional feel. The wall behind the bed reveals the clouds and the orb of the sun pushing through. This photograph inverts our vision of New York, transforming height into depth, and thus it shakes our feelings of groundedness and solidity.

A final picture from this section takes on another light in the wake of Sept. 11. An untitled photograph from Aaron Siskind’s 1936 series “Harlem Document” shows an African-American man in a cook’s apron. He leans out a window shaded by a vertically-striped awning. His right hand holds a pie, hawking it to passers-by; while his left rests on the sill. The fingers of that hand curl over the sign that hangs below which reads: “Peace / Home Cooked Meals / 10 & 15¢.”

Many of the photographs in the second part are not as explicitly about New York as those in the first—but that is what makes them most about New York. This city, after all, is not just an iconographic representation in the consciousness of America and the world. It is not a symbolic fantasy island of vice and freedom. New York is a place where people live their lives—as New Yorkers, yes—but Part two of Life of the City shows the “common” side of New York’s residents.

A clear thumbtack at each corner of the color prints fixes them to the wall so they may be easily removed and replaced by other people’s visions of New York. This section was assembled by submissions from anyone, and the actual component photographs change on a daily basis as new submissions arrive. The variety of images and artists reflects the diversity of the city. But what connects them is that, in general, the shots are more joyous than mournful. The section extols the wonders of life in the city rather than lamenting its destruction.

Hanging here are images of Coney Island before weeds turned it seedy, a Canal Street parade of Chinatown butchers holding slaughtered pigs, old men in tweed caps playing bocce in Corona, runners rejoicing past the marathon’s finish line and an ‘I love NY’ plastic bag in an orange wire-mesh garbage can. Here, too, are family snapshots: babies in Brooklyn, Central Park picnickers, mother and son trick-or-treaters, weddings, birthdays and the like.

It is not until part three that New York itself is “untacked” from the walls and rendered differently. The images of the World Trade Center destruction are designed to unnerve the viewer by undermining the current of life running through the rest of the exhibit. However, the scenes displayed on the back-to-back monitors somehow seem more mundane than they should—these photographs merely add to the inundation of media surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. They do not contribute to the exhibit in an aesthetic or artistic sense. Life of the City would be a much more appealing and integrated exhibit without the excess of the final section. There is no need to show the city’s death when it is still very much alive.

visual arts

Life of the City

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through May 21