B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (14 page)

Untitled [Street Facade 4], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)

This was a rhythm to which you could not dance. Beneath their bleak and bitter sheen, the other pictures had a bit of sepia charm from having passed into history, but this facade did not provide the comfort of the long gone. I knew—even then, growing up in Texas—that Harlem was a place where you could still find buildings boarded up like that, forsaken for more than half a century.

Hughes’s love poems still floated through my mind, along with the amorous territorialism of a jazz ballad I listened to as a teenager, playing the cassette in an infinite loop:
You can have Broadway / give me Lenox Avenue
. Those lyrics and everything I had heard about the Harlem Renaissance collided with the repulsion thrown off by the boarded-up buildings. I did not understand how this place existed as both haven and ghetto. It seemed, to my teenage mind, a great paradox. It also revealed something damning about the history I had learned—a flattened version of events where a place is allowed to be only one thing or the other.

The unpublished outtakes of Siskind’s Harlem project offer a submerged narrative. I was surprised to find many more disconcerting images of facades. It’s as if, while trawling uptown streets to record the scenes that became
Harlem Document,
Siskind had often retreated from the easy schematics of reportage, drifting toward photography as architectural survey. Frame after frame shows abandoned buildings and brownstones, elegant and majestic if not for the bricks and boards. Here, Siskind releases Harlem from the scrutinizing grip of the social realist’s eye, but the abstractions of his facade studies also tell a story.

I realized much later, that, though Siskind’s photos of abandoned buildings could not be classed as street life reportage or used as evidence for social programs of the New Deal, the images still documented events in motion. Just as the natural inclination of a dream
is not explosion but expression and fulfillment, the natural destiny of a building is not to be sealed off from the world around it, no longer offering shelter. The buildings had been abandoned and boarded up for a reason. There
was
human activity captured within the frame of those eerie photographs. The activity was contempt.

What you call a ghetto
, I call my home.
The voice of a young man who opens the introduction to Bruce Davidson’s book
East 100th Street
is a challenge to that project before it has even begun—a taunt to the photographer and viewer. The voice matches the stark, frank portraits in high-contrast black-and-white. The subjects often stare directly into the camera, unlike Siskind’s Harlemites—turned away or looking into the distance. I am still in the library as a teenager, but my taste for the real as defined by twentieth-century photographers has veered from nostalgic to gritty. Davidson delivered this quality in his 1960s portraits of street toughs and the tender shots of families whose lives seemed to sag along with their furniture. These images came closer to the realities I was by then reading about in Harlem coming-of-age memoirs by Claude Brown and Piri Thomas. How close? Davidson takes us into the bedroom of Harlem odalisques—one is draped naked across a bed that is itself stripped nearly to the ticking-covered mattress. Another photo shows a woman in a negligee, the heart-shaped cardboard top of an old Valentine’s candy box fixed to the wall as decoration. In another, the rotting carcass of a dead horse crowns the abundant debris piled in an empty lot.

My study of Davidson’s work was not limited to observation. In the pages of a commonplace book where I collected quotations from my favorite writers (at the time, Hurston and Baldwin, Ellison and Fanon, Whitman and Dickinson and Walcott), I also made sketches from the photographs of
East 100th Street.
If the
poetry of Hughes was one kind of apprenticeship (
Go home and write / a page tonight
…), Davidson’s pictures provoked another. But one element of the photographs could not be revealed by way of careful sketches—the white lie of the realist photographer, a sin of omission. We rarely learn under what circumstances such photographs are made. How did Davidson and Siskind gain entry? Were the reclining women in Davidson’s dingy rooms aspiring models, the photographer’s lovers, or whores? Who granted access? And after access, who granted permission?

These questions are necessary, because such photographs are destined to play a role, cast out of art’s refuge to the harsher realm of sociology and political propaganda. These pictures make an argument about the way life is lived. The people in a photograph end up as symbols. They are both specific and generic—the photographs capture moments in time and space, but the subjects are transformed into representative specimens.

Too often in documentary photographs, the transaction is obscured and the presence of the eye is not accounted for. As a film student experimenting with photography, I could never take pictures of people on the street. In those days—visiting Harlem to use the library—I made photo expeditions halfway across 125th Street before giving up and turning back toward Broadway. My efforts resulted in a mediocre collection of photos featuring no people at all, only words on signs. My eyes were drawn to two slogans in particular, united in their ubiquity:
JESUS SAVES
and
LIQUOR
.

In
Harlem Document,
Siskind’s images are paired with texts from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project. The project deployed a number of young writers, scholars, and journalists to collect oral histories from black New Yorkers, especially in Harlem. While a number of unknown writers participated
as interviewers,
Harlem Document
includes the work of a few who went on to prominence, including Ralph Ellison and Dorothy West. Though not included in the Siskind volume, the wider project also gave a boost to the young Zora Neale Hurston, as well as to Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, and Richard Wright. They were paid twenty dollars per week for their services.

The question of access that sounds so urgently from the Harlem photographs of Siskind and Davidson also arises from the stories collected by these oral historians. FWP writer Frank Byrd answers it this way:
I was a neighborhood boy
.
So Byrd could easily join games of hardball, basketball, and stickball, and then strike up conversations.
That way you got to know the people. And that was the beginning, you see…. Then you had to pass the time of day with them until you felt a warm relationship so that you could talk, so that
they
could talk.

Ralph Ellison remembered a similar method.
I hung around playgrounds
. I hung around the streets, the bars. I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. I would tell some stories to get people going and then I’d sit back and try to get it as accurately as I could.

Both men describe a kind of stakeout, where their proximity led to friendship, which eventually led to talk. But there was also a proximity of circumstances, for
they were black and themselves “on relief.
”

In some cases, the writers later converted the FWP material into their own artistic product. One encounter, transcribed by Dorothy West and included in
Harlem Document,
shows the young writer clearly trying out her powers of narrative, pathos, and poetry within the confines of her sociological mission. Ralph Ellison uses the words of one woman—whom he must have approached in one of those hundreds of apartment buildings he canvassed for the FWP—in his essay “The Way It Is.” He records the suspicion with which his questions were met:

Another example is the barstool testimony of a railroad porter interviewed by Ellison:

Yuh understand? Naw, naw, you don’t get me.
The railroad porter’s existential musings later appear verbatim, from the mouth of a character in Ellison’s
Invisible Man.

Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin (left to right), ca. 1955. (Courtesy of the Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)