Blackout: photography, darkness, and New York City 1965-1985

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Content BLACKOUT:
PHOTOGRAPHY, DARKNESS, AND NEW YORK CITY, 1965-1985
by
Myles Oliver Little
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Myles Oliver Little

ii
To
Marisa Lopez
Vanessa Schwartz
Nancy Lutkehaus
Suzanne Hudson
Megan Luke
Jenny Greenhill

iii
Table of Contents
Dedication……………….……………….…………………….……………….…………………ii
List of Figures……………………….……………….……………….……………….……….…iv
Abstract……………….……………….……………….……………….……….……..…...……...l
INTRODUCTION……………….……………….……………….……………….……………...1
CHAPTER 1
René Burri’s Camera Vision and the 1965 Blackout…………….…………….…………….…..39
CHAPTER 2
Bruce Davidson’s Underground Nightmare…………….…………….…………….………...…86
CHAPTER 3
Alvin Baltrop’s Waterfront Opacities…………….…………….…………….…..………….…143
CHAPTER 4
Tod Papageorge’s Woven Creations…………….…………….…………….…………….……186
CONCLUSION…………….…………….…………….…………….…………….………...…232
Bibliography…………….…………….…………….…………….…………….…………...…236
APPENDIX
Illustrations…………….…………….…………….…………….…………….……………….279

iv
List of Figures
Figure 1.1 The signs of Times Square lit up at night, 1927………………..........................279
Schenectady Museum/Hall of Electrical History Foundation
Corbis via Getty Images
Figure 1.2 A large crowd gathers outside of Studio 54, hoping to get in…..........................280
1978.
John Barrett -- PHOTOlink/Alamy
Figure 1.3 US Senator Joseph McCarthy. 1953.…….……..…….…….……......................281
Ullstein bild via Getty Images
Figure 1.4 January 2, 1944 front page of the New York Times..……….….….…….……...282
Figure 1.5 December 30, 1978 front page of the New York Times…….….….….…...…...283
Figure 1.6 Police and demonstrators are in a melee near the Conrad….….….….………...284
Hilton Hotel on Chicago's Michigan Avenue on August
28th, 1968 during the Democratic National Convention.
Bettmann / Getty Images
Figure 1.7 Italian Family Seeking Lost Luggage, Ellis Island, 1905………………………285
Lewis Hine -- National Child Labor Committee Collection,
Library of Congress
Figure 1.8 A cavalry soldier looks through a “starlight scope” that is……..….…………...286
attached to an M16 rifle in Vietnam on January 13, 1967.
The “starlight” is a device that intensifies moon and
reflected starlight hundreds of times and is used by U.S.
armed forces all over Vietnam to spot the enemy at night.
Johner/AP Photo
Figure 1.9 The ZEISS Planar f/0.7 50mm lens was, at the time of its….….….….………..287
creation, the “fastest” lens in the world, meaning that its
aperture could open extremely wide, allowing it to shoot in
very dark situations.
ZEISS Museum of Optics
Figure 1.10 Actors Patrick Magee and Ryan O'Neal gamble by……….….….….…………288

v
candlelight in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon.
Everett Collection
Figure 1.11 Old main railroad station in Frankfurt, Germany in 1962……….….………….289
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 1.12 Postcard from the 1964-65 New York City World’s Fair……….….….……….290
featuring an aerial photograph of the Kodak Pavilion.
World's Fairs. “Kodak Pavilion Postcard 1964-1965.”
Accessed July 19, 2024.
http://www.worldsfairs.amdigital.co.uk.libproxy1.usc.edu/
Documents/Details/HML_2538d.
Figure 1.13 An advertisement for Kodak’s Instamatic camera in the…….….….…………..291
back of a pamphlet Kodak distributed at the 1964-65
World’s Fair.
Kodak At The Fair: Under The Picture Tower A World Of
Adventure In The Kodak Pavilion (Rochester, NY: Eastman
Kodak Company, 1964), unpaginated.
Figure 1.14 The Kodak Pavilion at night, during the New York World's……….….……….292
Fair, Flushing Meadows, New York City, New York, 1964.
Morse Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Figure 1.15 To create the Kodak Pavilion’s giant photographs,……….……..……………..293
technicians had sliced the 8x10” negatives into twelve strips,
inserted them one at a time into a towering horizontal
enlarger, and projected a powerful light through them onto
twelve corresponding, massive strips of photo-sensitive paper
which had been vacuum-sealed to the wall.
Bob Hering, “World’s Largest Color Prints,” Popular
Science, May 1964, 161.
Figure 1.16 A technical diagram of the giant photography display…………………...….....294
crowning the Kodak Pavilion at the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
A complex vacuum system hidden inside the circular display
held the photographs in place, and massive banks of hidden
lights illuminated it from below.

vi
Bob Hering, “World’s Largest Color Prints,” Popular
Science, May 1964, 158.
Figure 1.17 “A Wet Night on the Embankment,” 1896. …….…….……..……………..…..295
Paul Martin -- Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Figure 1.18 “London By Gaslight,” American Amateur Photographer 8, ………...………..296
no. 11 (November 1,
1896): 468. Photograph by Paul Martin.
Figure 1.19 “Night Photography,” Photographic Times: An Illustrated……..……...….…..297
Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Interests of Artistic and
Scientific Photography 29, no. 4 (April 1897): 161.
Photograph by William A. Fraser.
Figure 1.20 “The Savoy Hotel, Stormy Night,” photograph from the…..………..…..……..298
article “Night Photography,” Photographic Times: An
Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Interests of
Artistic and Scientific Photography 29, no. 4 (April 1897):
163.
Photograph by William A. Fraser.
Figure 1.21 Savoy Hotel, New York, 1897.………………..………………..………………299
Alfred Stieglitz -- Art Institute of Chicago
Figure 1.22 Edward Steichen, “The Flatiron--Evening,” 1904.………………..……………300
Estate of Edward Steichen
Figure 1.23 “In the Luxembourg Gardens,” 1879………………..………………….………301
John Singer Sargent
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Figure 1.24 September 22, 1938 front page of New York Daily News.……………..……….302
“Many Dead In Hurricane, Bodies Cast On L.I. Shore;
Subways Stop; Hotels Dark.”
Figure 1.25 Lower Manhattan in New York looked like this during a………………..….…303
20-minute test blackout, March 25, 1942. The area covered
by the blackout extended five square miles, from the Battery
north to 14th Street. Lights at bottom are boats in the East

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River and reflections in Brooklyn. Lights at left are from
the New Jersey shore, which wasn’t affected by the blackout.
Tom Fitzsimmons -- AP
Figure 1.26 New York Times coverage of the February 8, 1971 blackout.………...………..304
Figure 1.27 The photograph, overlaid with text, accompanying the New…………..……….305
York Herald Tribune’s
1965 series “New York City in Crisis.”
Figure 1.28 A vacant lot appears with a stripped car at Findlay Avenue……………..…..…306
and East 165th St. in the South Bronx on January 4, 1973.
Anthony Pescatore/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Figure 1.29 A map of New York City shows the location of the “Son of…………………..307
Sam” murders of 1976 and 1977.
Getty Images
Figure 1.30 Police escort handcuffed Son of Sam suspect David………………..….………308
Berkowitz into police headquarters in lower Manhattan.
Alan Aaronson -- New York Daily News via Getty Images
Figure 2.1 New York City, 1978.…………….………………….....…………….…...........309
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.2 Portrait of Hans Finsler, teacher of “Fotoklasse” at the……….………..………310
Zürich School of Art and Design, Switzerland, 1957.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.3 Poster for Film und Foto. 1929.………………..………………...………..……311
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Lauder
Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund
Figure 2.4 Service (Clematis model; Langenthal porcelain factory);…………………..….312
undated [after 1935]
Hans Finsler

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From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.5 Fold-out brochure for the Wohnbedarf AG Christmas………………..……..…313
exhibition; 1953.
Design: Richard Paul Lohse; Photos: Hans Finsler.
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.6 Electric bulb with parts of the socket, 1928.………………..…………………..314
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.7 Left: Cowper, Seen from below. Blast furnace plant.………………..…………315
Herrenwyk. Right: Iron shoe for fabrication.
From Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schön. Einhundert
photographische Aufnahmen (The world is beautiful: One
hundred photographic images). Munich: Einhorn-Verl, 1928.
Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.
© 2014/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG
Bild-Kunst, Germany
Figure 2.8 Textile (close-up instructions index card No. 635) ca 1941…………..………..316
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.9 Tissue paper storage; 1935/36………………..……………..………...………..317
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.10 Textile production (F. M. Hämmerle, Dornbirn); 1935/36………………..……318
Hans Finsler

ix
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.11 Roter Turm (Red Tower), Halle, Germany. Date unknown.……..……...……..319
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.12 Roter Turm (Red Tower), Halle, Germany. Date unknown……….…………...320
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.13 Giebichenstein Bridge, Halle, Germany. Date unknown…………..…………...321
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.14 Giebichenstein Bridge, Halle, Germany. Date unknown.…..…………..…..…..322
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.15 Immeuble Clarté, Geneva, facade detail; 1932………………..………………..323
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.16 Immeuble Clarté, Geneva. A two-story living room with…..…………..….…..324
furniture by Marcel Breuer and a painting by Hans Arp, 1932.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

x
Figure 2.17 Carousel in Lunapark near Bellevue. Zürich Light Week,………….………….325
October 1932.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.18 Light sculptures, signposts, Globus department store, railway…….…………..326
station bridge seen from Central Zürich. Light Week,
October 1932.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.19 Burri’s photography classmates photographed on a school…..……..……..…...327
trip to Venice. Book maquette, 1951.
Unknown [René Burri?]
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.20 Kindergarten Riedenhalden, Affoltern, Zürich, 1953. From……….…………..328
BIGA diploma thesis,
Zürich University of Art and Design.
René Burri
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk,
Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
Figure 2.21 Cover, Zurcher Illustrierte 36 (September 8, 1939) ………………..…….……329
Photography by Gotthard
Schuh. Original in color.
Figure 2.22 “After rain” (left), “Macy-Parade” (right) on double page……………………..330
spread in Camera 12
(December 1949), 366-367.
Robert Frank

xi
Figure 2.23 At a special school for deaf-mute children which teaches………..…..…..…….331
them to “hear” through their vibratory senses, a child
concentrates on the tambourine through which he “hears”
the amplified beats of the piano. Zürich, Switzerland. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.24 At a special school for deaf-mute children, children touch….…..……..…..…..332
the piano with their hands, forehead or temple in order to
“hear” the vibration of the music. Two children hold sticks,
and when they hear a “forte,” they hit them together. Zürich,
Switzerland. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.25 At a special school for deaf-mutes, the children take their……..…….….……..333
first dancing lessons.
Zürich, Switzerland. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.26 “Touch of Music for the Deaf.” Life, July 11, 1955, 95.…..……….…..…..…..334
Photographs by René Burri -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 2.27 “Le Corbusier,” Du 6 (1961): 19-31. Photograph by René…….….…..…...…..335
Burri -- Magnum Photos Digital Archive.
Figure 2.28 “Le Corbusier,” Du, 6 (1961): 19-31. Photograph by René…..………………..336
Burri -- Magnum Photos
Figure 2.29 Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp, designed by…..……..…………337
Le Corbusier. Windows where painted glass panels will be
mounted. Most of the slits for light widen to the interior of
the edifice, some however on the exterior; the openings thus
mediate between the two different areas. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:

xii
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.30 Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp. Simple meal……..…..….……..338
in a makeshift wooden construction, which provided shelter
for the celebrations. Le Corbusier is sitting next to the Bishop
of Besançon. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.31 Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp. Inauguration……..…………….339
of chapel. [Person lighting candle.] 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.32 Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp. Inauguration….………………..340
of chapel. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.33 “Atelier 35 S". Le Corbusier’s private office at 7th. 35, rue…….……………..341
de Sèvres, Paris, France. At left: lithograph of the “Modulor”
and at right a painting, both by Le Corbusier. 1959.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.34 The painter, architect and city planner Le Corbusier in his…….………………342
Paris apartment-studio. 1959.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.35 In Le Corbusier's penthouse flat and studio (which he……….……….….…….343
designed between 1931 and 1934) are mementos of the
architect's mother and his wife, Yvonne Gallis, who died in
1957. 1959.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos

xiii
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.36 Letter from Le Corbusier to René Burri. February 6, 1962….……….…..…….344
Figure 2.37 A man rides his bicycle through the Var department, Hyères,..………………..345
France. 1932.
Henri Cartier-Bresson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.38 Schematic total binocular field of view (gray area); the……..…………………346
dotted frame is a rectangle with a 3:2 width/height aspect
ratio.
From Ulrich Teubner and Hans Josef Brückner, Optical
Imaging and Photography: Introduction to Science and
Technology of Optics, Sensors and Systems (Boston: De
Gruyter, 2019), 21.
Figure 2.39 São Paulo, Brazil. 1960………………..………………..………….……..…….347
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.40 One’s perspective on distant objects varies very little, even…….….…….……348
if they do not occupy the same plane. This contributes to the
“compression” effect of telephoto images.
The author.
Figure 2.41 [The Edge of the Broad] 1893, photogravure…….…………..…….…………..349
Peter Henry Emerson
Getty Museum
Figure 2.42 Cross-section of the Dallmeyer telephoto lens, 1891………………..…………350
From T.R. Dallmeyer, Telephotography (London: William
Heinemann, 1899), 135.
Figure 2.43 From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photograph by………………..……351
René Burri -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 2.44 From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photographs by……………………352

xiv
René Burri -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 2.45 From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photographs by………..………..…353
René Burri -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 2.46 From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photographs by……..…………..…354
René Burri -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 2.47 Tokyo, Japan. Sports Day. 1980.………………………………………………355
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com.
Figure 2.48 Champs Elysées, Paris, France. July 14, 1973. [Crowd………………………..356
viewing the Bastille Day parade.]
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com.
Figure 2.49 Mercado Modelo, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil from “Bahia:…….…….……….…..357
Porträt einer Stadt [Bahia: Portrait of a City]” Du 27
(January 1967): 502-564. Photograph by René Burri –
Magnum Photos.
Figure 2.50 Frontispiece to Anton Wilhelm Schowart, Der Adeliche………………………358
Hofemeister. Frankfurt: Hartmann, 1693. The illustration
of a staircase a young aristocrat must ascend demonstrates
a spatial conception of knowledge.
Figure 2.51 An undated aerial reconnaissance photograph of World War…………………359
I trench networks at Le Plantin, France.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Figure 2.52 Anthropologist Marcel Griaule photographs from a clifftop…………………..360
near Sanga, Africa as ethnomusicologist Andre Schaeffner
holds him by the ankles. October-November 1931.
From James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture Twentiethcentury Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 68.

xv
Figure 2.53 Ernesto Guevara (Che), Argentinian politician, Minister of….…….…….….…361
Industry for Cuba (1961-1965) during an exclusive interview
in his office in Havana, Cuba. 1963.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com.
Figure 2.54 “The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway System and….…….…….………362
Profile.”
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District
www.lre.usace.army.mil/Portals/69/Recreation/SooLocks/
profile%20and%20system.pdf.
Figure 2.55 First known view of Niagara Falls, published in Father…….…………...……..363
Louis Hennepin's New
Discovery published in Utrecht in 1697. He was the first
white man to describe the falls in detail, while accompanying
La Salle's expedition of 1678.
Three Lions/Getty Images
Figure 2.56 Passengers stranded in a New York City subway train caught…….…………..364
between stations are led along the tracks by policemen. Some
800,000 people were in the subway when the November 9,
1965 blackout struck.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Figure 2.57 People line up to use a pay telephone outside the………………..……..………365
Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company Building at 270
Park Avenue during the power failure in New York on
November 9, 1965.
Pictorial Parade/Getty Images
Figure 2.58 Front page of the November 10, 1965 issue of the New York………...………..366
Times featuring coverage of the blackout.
Figure 2.59 An engraving depicts a Purpura, a genus of sea snails, marine…….…………..367
gastropod mollusks in the family Muricidae, with which
Phoenicians made Tyrian cloth. Circa 19th century.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via
Getty Images

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Figure 2.60 Advice on how to see best in the dark. “Plane can be seen…………………….368
against night sky best if eye scans circle around it. Direct
look at plane (right) beclouds its image, due to nightblindness of the day-vision cone cells.”
“Night Vision,” Life, October 5, 1942.
Figure 2.61 Professor John Zubek and an assistant prepare the sensory……………………369
deprivation dome in his lab at University of Manitoba in 1959.
Winnipeg Free Press
Figure 2.62 Distribution of photoreceptors in the human retina. (A)...…….………………..370
Cones are present at a low density throughout the retina,
with a sharp peak in the center of the fovea (the foveola).
Conversely, rods are present at high density throughout
most of the retina, with a sharp decline in the fovea; rods
are absent in the foveola. Boxes show face-on sections
through the outer segments of the photoreceptors at different
eccentricities.
From Dale Purves, et al., Neuroscience (New York: Oxford
University Press), 245.
Figure 2.63 The information booth in New York City’s Grand Central…………………….371
Station during the 1965 blackout.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.64 “All Day in Grand Central Station,” New York Times,….……….………..……372
February 24, 1924, 3.
Figure 2.65 An advertisement in New York City’s Grand Central Station…………………373
during the 1965 blackout.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.66 During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965……….……..…….…………...374
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:

xvii
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 2.67 During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965………………..…….…………...375
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.68 During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965………………..……….………...376
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.69 During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965. [Digitally…………..……..……377
darkened by the author.]
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.70 During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965. [Digitally…….…………..….…378
brightened by the author.]
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.71 During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965.………………..………….……..379
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 2.72 Plan of the Island of New York in North America, but only……….…….….…380
from the eastern side in the Vicinity of the late Fort
Washington, afterwards Knyphausen, which was taken in
the month of May 1779 from the Laurel Hill, but first drawn
in the month of January 1781 in the Hut encampment near
Fort Knyphausen.
D. T. Valentine and George Hayward
Figure 2.73 Aerial view of New York with insets of famous buildings ca…….….………...381
1880. Pen-and-wash drawing.
Accession number: 38.76

xviii
Unique identifier: MNY104741
Museum of the City of New York
Figure 3.1 A Transit Authority police officer with a German shepherd……..….…..……..382
stands in a subway car
as a crime deterrent, New York City, September 12, 1981.
Allan Tannenbaum -- Getty Images
Figure 3.2 New York City subway, 1980………………..…………….…..………..……...383
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com.
Figure 3.3 Nazis select prisoners on the platform at the entrance of the………………..…384
Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Yad Vashem Archives/AFP via Getty Images
Figure 3.4 New York. 1953. Light House Mission………………...………..………..……385
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 3.5 New York. 1953. Light House Mission………………..……….……..…..……386
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 3.6 On the set of the 1966 Mark Robson war film The Lost…….……….…………387
Command, local children pretend to be the actors by
“playing dead.” The photographer asked a friend, an
American-educated priest, to step into the frame.
Reproduced in the August 15, 1966 issue of Vogue.
Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.7 USA. New Haven, Connecticut. 1954. Yale football………………..…………388
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 3.8 USA. New Haven, Connecticut. 1954. Yale football………………..…………389

xix
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
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Figure 3.9 USA. New Haven, Connecticut. 1954. Yale football………………..…………390
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.10 Spread from “A Dangerous Silence,” pages 70-71, in the……..………….……391
October 31, 1955 issue of Life magazine. Photographs by
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.11 Spread from “A Dangerous Silence,” pages 72-73, in the….….………….……392
October 31, 1955 issue of Life magazine. Photographs by
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.12 Spread from “A Dangerous Silence,” pages 74-75, in the…….…………..……393
October 31, 1955 issue of Life magazine. Photographs by
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.13 France. Paris. 1956. Mme. Fauché, the widow of an………………..….………394
impressionist painter.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.14 France. Paris. 1956. Mme. Fauché, the widow of an……….…….…….………395
impressionist painter.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.15 France. Paris. 1956. Mme. Fauché, the widow of an…….…………..…………396
impressionist painter.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.16 “Widow of Montmartre.” Esquire, October 1, 1958………………..………….397

xx
Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Figure 3.17 “Widow of Montmartre.” Esquire, October 1, 1958………………..….………398
Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Figure 3.18 “Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,”………………..399
Life, October 21, 1957, 110-111. Photographs by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.19 “Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,”………………..400
Life, October 21, 1957, 112-113. Photographs by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.20 “Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,” ……………….401
Life, October 21, 1957, 114-115. Photographs by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.21 USA. Montgomery, Alabama. 1961. National Guard soldiers…….….………..402
escort Freedom Riders along their ride from Montgomery to
Jackson, Mississippi.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.22 “Bruce Davidson”……… ………………..………………..…….……………..403
July 7 - October 2, 1966
Curated by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art
Figure 3.23 USA. New York City. 1966. East 100th Street………………..……...………...404
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.24 “East 100th Street: Photographs by Bruce Davidson”.…………………………405
September 22 - November 29, 1970
Curated by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art
Figure 3.25 Vogue Magazine 1962. Young Spring Fashion………………..……………….406

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Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.26 USA. NYC. 1963. Vogue shoot at Lincoln Center………………..……...…….407
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.27 USA. San Francisco. 1965. Topless restaurant………………..………………..408
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.28 USA. Palisades, New Jersey. 1958. The Dwarf. Jimmy………………..………409
Armstrong.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.29 USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang and the………………..…...……410
American writer Norman Mailer.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.30 USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang………………..…………………411
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.31 USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang………………..………….……...412
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.32 USA. Brooklyn, NY. 1959. Brooklyn Gang. Bengie inside……………………413
the candy store.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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xxii
pro.magnumphotos.com.
Figure 3.33 USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang. Coney Island…………………...414
Cathy fixing her hair in a cigarette machine mirror.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.34 A map of New York City in which neighborhoods with high…………...……..415
rates of juvenile delinquency are highlighted. From Emanuel
Perlmutter, “Gangs -- What They Are And What To Do
About Them,” New York Times, September 6, 1959, 7.
Figure 3.35 A photograph from Emma Harrison, “U. S. To Aid Plan For………...………..416
Youths Here,” New York Times, December 16, 1959, 46.
The caption reads, “James E. McCarthy, director of action
phase of new program to combat juvenile delinquency,
indicates area to be covered on Lower East Side. With him
are Raymond Gould, social sciences consultant for the
National Institute of Mental Health, which has granted
$412,677 for drive, and Dr. Clara Kaiser, acting dean of New
York School of Social Research, who will head research end
of the project.”
Figure 3.36 A photograph from “Boy, 16, Is Killed In Gang Ambush At…..………..……..417
Bronx School,” New York Times, September 22, 1959, 1.
The caption reads, “Scene of Shooting: The entrance to
Morris High School at Boston Road and 166th Street in the
Bronx, where John Guzman, 16, was fatally wounded
yesterday.”
Figure 3.37 Cars speed over road markings in New York City, 1957…..………..……........418
Ernst Haas -- Getty Images
Figure 3.37 Spread from Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo………………………….419
Journal. (1974) At left, “Factory Lunch,” 1973; at right,
“August 26, Man-Children,” 1971.
Abigail Heyman
Figure 3.38 Untitled, from Travelog (1974) ………………..……………………………….420

xxiii
Charles Harbutt
Figure 3.39 A Monimbo woman carrying her dead husband home to be………….………..421
buried in their backyard. Monimbo, Nicaragua. 1979. From
Nicaragua (1981)
Susan Meiselas -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.40 Iran. Tabriz. 1980. Demonstration in favor of the leading……..……..……..…422
opposition figure
Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari.
Gilles Peress -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.41 USA. New York City. 1979………………..………………..……..…………...423
Gilles Peress -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.42 Cover of Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday………………..………424
Night.” New York, June 7, 1976.
Figure 3.43 “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960”…...….…………425
July 26 - October 2, 1978
Curated by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art
Figure 3.44 USA. New York City. 1966. East 100th Street………………..………………..426
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.45 Subway Portrait, 1941………………..………………..………………..………427
Walker Evans
Museum of Modern Art
Figure 3.46 Subway Portrait, 1941………………..………….……..………………....…….428
Walker Evans

xxiv
Museum of Modern Art
Figure 3.47 Subway Portrait, 1941………………..………………..………….…………….429
Walker Evans
Museum of Modern Art
Figure 3.48 USA. New York City. 1957. Lower East Side. Schoolboy…….….….……..…430
and girl with a doll.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.49 USA. New York City. Lower East Side. 1990. Rabbi Moishe…………………431
Singer (L) and his brother, Rabbi Joseph Singer, overseer of
the Mikvah, one of the most honored jobs in the Jewish
religion and one which is handed down from Rabbi to Rabbi.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.50 USA. 1965. Isaac Singer, author………………..………………..……….…….432
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.51 Still from the short film “Isaac Singer's Nightmare and Mrs……………….….433
Pupko's Beard,” (1972) directed by Bruce Davidson –
Magnum Photos. UCR Arts website: https://virtualucrarts.
ucr.edu/cinema/isaac-singers-nightmare-ms-pupkos-beard.
Figure 3.52 “The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973……….………...……434
Photographs and text by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.53 “The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973……….………..…….435
Photographs and text by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.54 “The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973……….…….…..……436
Photographs and text by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.55 “The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973…….…….……..……437

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Photographs and text by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.56 USA. New York City. 1966. Bessie Gakaubowicz, holding a……….….……..438
photograph of her
and her husband taken before World War II.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.57 USA. New York City. 1973. The Cafeteria…………..……..……..…………...439
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.58 Horse railway, circa 1889. The horse railway, aka horse car,………………….440
was invented by John Stevenson in 1832. Horses pulled a
streetcar riding on metal rails down the street.
New-York Historical Society
Figure 3.59 “Beauties of Street Car Travel in New York,” Harper’s………..…….…..……441
Illustrated Weekly, 1871.
Library of Congress
Figure 3.60 Proposed elevated railroad terrace for Broadway. Gleason’s…….…………….442
Drawing Room Companion, April 1, 1854.
Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village
Figure 3.61 “Dr. Rufus H. Gilbert’s Covered Atmospheric Railway.”……….………..……443
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper, March 18, 1871.
Figure 3.62 “Speer’s Endless Railway Train.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated………….……….444
Newspaper, March 21, 1874.
Figure 3.63 Pedestrians, a trolley car and a horse-drawn carriage traffic……...……………445
appear under the 6th Avenue elevated train line at Herald
Square, New York City. Mounds of snow lie on the street.
Winter 1899.
Museum of the City of New York/Byron Collection

xxvi
Figure 3.64 “The Great Subway Contractor -- the Promised Loaf.” 1911……….………….446
John Sloan
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia.
Figure 3.65 Scene showing the opening of the first subway, New York, ……….………….447
October 27, 1904. In attendance and riding the first train
were municipal officials and civic and business leaders. At
that time, the underground extended for 21 miles.
Getty Images
Figure 3.66 TAKI 183 graffiti at 183rd and Audubon Avenue in New………………..……448
York, NY, July 19, 1971.
Don Hogan Charles -- New York Times/Redux
Figure 3.67 USA. New York City. 1980. Subway………………..………….……..……….449
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.68 Three photographs by Neal Boenzi illustrating Ralph…………...……..………450
Blumenthal, “Four Days on Subway -- A Fresh Look at
Lingering Problems,” New York Times, March 1, 1977, 61.
The caption reads, “Outwardly impassive, the subway rider
stands resignedly on his noisy, bumpy road home. The crush
of humanity subsides after midnight, when trains are eerily
empty.”
Figure 3.69 A photograph of a graffiti-covered subway train…………..……..….…………451
accompanying Stan Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders: Why the MTA
Doesn’t Work,” Village Voice, March 17, 1980, 25.
Photography by Fred W. McDarrah.
Figure 3.70 A photograph of a sculpture by Michelle Horwitz………………..……………452
accompanying Paul L. Montgomery, “Some Call It ‘The
Black Hole Of Calcutta,’” New York Times, November 15,
1970, 8.
Figure 3.71 A photograph of a sculpture by Tom Hachtman and Joey……………...………453
Epstein accompanying Ethan C. Eldon, “Our Subways:
Worthy of a Second Dante,” New York Times, July 2, 1976, 27.

xxvii
Figure 3.72 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………………………454
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.73 (Untitled), 1980………………..…………………………………..……………455
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.74 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..……………..…..……………456
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.75 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..…..…………457
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.76 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..…….………458
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.77 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..………..……459
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.78 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..……….………..…….………460
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.79 Scene from Moulin Rouge, 1952, directed by John Huston………..…………..461
with Eliot Elisofon as color consultant.
Everett Collection

xxviii
Figure 3.80 “Razzle-dazzle Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec.” Life January 19, …………………462
1953. Pages 64-65.
Photographs by Eliot Elisofon.
Figure 3.81 “Seven Stars in Seven Colors.” Life June 29, 1953………..………..….………463
Photographs by Eliot Elisofon.
Figure 3.82 “Seven Stars in Seven Colors.” Life June 29, 1953………………..……..…….464
Photographs by Eliot Elisofon.
Figure 3.83 USA. New York City. 1980. Subway………………..………………...……….465
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.84 USA. NYC. 1957. Lower East Side………………..………………..………….466
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.85 France. Paris. 1948. Model wearing Dior on the banks of………………..……467
the Seine.
Robert Capa -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.86 “How to Swim Now -- 4 Easy Ways.” Vogue, September 1,………….……….468
1962, 150-151.
Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.87 Cover of Vogue, February 15, 1961. Photography by Bruce……….………..…469
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.88 Vogue fashion shoot, New York City. 1960. Exact date……..……….…..……470
unknown. Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.89 “What your clothes owe you…and where you may be………..………..………471
shortchanging your clothes.” Vogue April 1, 1961. 108.
Photography by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

xxix
Figure 3.90 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..….………….472
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.91 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..……..………473
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.92 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..………..……474
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.93 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..……..………475
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.94 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..………..……476
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.95 USA. New York City. 1975. Isaac Bashevis Singer………………..…….…….477
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.96 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………....……………478
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.97 A SS trooper acts as auxiliary policeman on patrol with a……………………..479
regular policeman in Berlin, Germany in March 1933.
INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
Figure 3.98 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..……………..…..……………480

xxx
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.99 Tereska, a child in a residence for disturbed children in……………….………481
Poland. She drew a picture
of “home” on the blackboard. 1948.
David Seymour -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.100 (Untitled), 1980……………………………………………………...………….482
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.101 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..….………….483
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.102 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………………………484
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.103 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..……..………485
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.104 The Promise, 1949………………..………………..………………..…….……486
Barnett Newman
Whitney Museum of American Art
Figure 3.105 (Untitled), 1980………………..………………..………………..………..……487
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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xxxi
Figure 3.106 Pages 94-95 from Gerhard Schoenberner, The Yellow Star:…………..……….488
The Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933 – 1945. New
York: Bantam Books, 1979. Originally published in German
as Der Gelbe Stern (1960) The left-hand image is a still
taken from a short film made by an unnamed German soldier
present at the July 1941 pogrom in Lviv. The author of the
book credits Glavnoye Arkivnoye Upravleniye, Moscow’s
main directorate of foreign military intelligence, for the image.
Figure 3.107 (Untitled), 1980.………………………………….…………………..…………489
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.108 (Untitled), 1980.……………………………….…………………..……………490
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.109 (Untitled), 1980……………………………….…………………..…………….491
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.110 Cover of New York magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring………………..…492
Michael Daly’s story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph
by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.111 (Untitled), 1985………………………………..…………………..…………....493
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
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Figure 3.112 A costumed decoy police officer appears in New York……………..…….……494
magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring Michael Daly’s
story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.113 A costumed decoy police officer appears in New York…………….………..…495
magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring Michael Daly’s

xxxii
story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 3.114 A costumed decoy police officer appears in New York………….………..……496
magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring Michael Daly’s
story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.
Figure 4.1 The back of Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag, repurposed from a…..………………497
military-issued shoulder bag, on which Baltrop inscribed a
poem and a drawing of New York City’s West Side Highway.
Bronx Museum of Art
Figure 4.2 The side of Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag, repurposed from a……………...……498
military-issued shoulder bag, on which Baltrop inscribed a
poem and a drawing of New York City’s West Side Highway.
Bronx Museum of Art
Figure 4.3 The very first container is loaded aboard the Ideal X at Port……..……………499
Newark, New Jersey, on April 26, 1956. The ship is dressed
with a string of international maritime signal flags as a sign
of celebration of the occasion.
Journal of Commerce
Figure 4.4 An aerial view of the Ideal X carrying fifty-eight containers…..………………500
from Port Newark, New Jersey, to the Port of Houston, Texas.
Journal of Commerce
Figure 4.5 A truck and car fell onto West Street as a section of the West…………………501
Side Highway gave way near Little West 12th Street.
December 16, 1973.
Ted Cowell -- New York Times
Figure 4.6 Untitled, 1967……………………………….…………..………..……….……502
Acrylic sheet and galvanized iron
6 1/8 × 27 × 24 inches (15.6 × 68.6 × 60.9 cm)
Donald Judd
Walker Art Center
Figure 4.7 (Untitled), 1975-1986. …………………………….….…………………..……503

xxxiii
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.8 (Untitled), 1975-1986……………………………….……...……………..……504
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.9 (Untitled), 1975-1986……………………………….…….……………..…..…505
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.10 (Untitled), 1975-1986………………………………..…………..………..……506
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.11 Left to right: James, Alvin, and Dorothy Mae Baltrop,…….………………..…507
mid-1950s, The Bronx, NY.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.12 “Untitled (The Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park, New York City),”…………………508
1965.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.13 “Dionysus in 69” (1968) at the Performing Garage, designed…………………509
by Jerry Rojo. Pentheus (Richard Dia) pointing to Dionysus
(William Finley) in the midst of the spectators.
Photo: Frederick Eberstadt, courtesy: Richard Schechner.
Figure 4.14 Dionysus in 69………………………………………………………………..…510
Director: Richard Schechner Production: The Performance
Group
New York, 1969
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 118-119.
Figure 4.15 Marat/Sade…………………………………………………………………...…511
Director: Peter Brook
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden

xxxiv
City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 28-29.
Figure 4.16 Marat/Sade……………………………………………….…………………..…512
Director: Peter Brook
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 30-31.
Figure 4.17 Marat/Sade……………………………………………………….………..……513
Director: Peter Brook
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 34-35.
Figure 4.18 Yukio Mishima poses as St. Sebastian, inspired by Guido…………..…………514
Reni’s Saint Sebastian (ca. 1616), now in the Palazzo Rosso
of Genoa. This photograph was published in the first issue of
the literary magazine Chi to bara (Blood and roses) (1966).
Shinoyama Kishin/Tensei
Figure 4.19 (Author Yukio Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian) ……………….……..……515
From Ba-Ra-Kei Ordeal by Roses: Photographs of Yukio
Mishima by Eikoh Hosoe. New York: Aperture, 1985.
Eikoh Hosoe
Figure 4.20 “John Lennon & Yoko Ono,” from Double Fantasy, Cologne:…..……………516
Taschen, 2015.
Kishin Shinoyama
Figure 4.21 Bathing in the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome, 1957……………….……517
Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Figure 4.22 Untitled, from Man and Woman. 1961…………………..……………………..518
Eikoh Hosoe
Figure 4.23 Untitled, from Man and Woman. 1961………………………..……………..…519
Eikoh Hosoe
Figure 4.24 Three Navy Sailors, n.d (1969-1972) ……………………………………….…520
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.

xxxv
Figure 4.25 Navy Ship, n.d (1969-1972).……………………………………………………521
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.26 Alvin Baltrop’s New York City taxicab driver’s license, 1975……...…………522
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.27 Alvin Baltrop and his girlfriend Alice [last name unknown],….………………523
undated.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.28 (Untitled), 1975-1986.…………………………………………….……………524
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.29 (Untitled), 1975-1986………………………………..…….……….…….…….525
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.30 (Untitled), 1975-1986…………………………………………………..………526
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.31 A military parade in Cairo, Egypt in 1970.………………………..……………527
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 4.32 Factory workers and students visit the Great Wall of China……….……..……528
on their day off. From “Red China -- Spruced up for Show,”
Life, July 17, 1964, 102.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 4.33 (Untitled), 1975-1986………………………….……………..……………..….529
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.

xxxvi
Figure 4.34 (Untitled), 1975-1986…………………………………………………….…….530
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.35 Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat Part II, 1973…………………………….……531
Everett Collection
Figure 4.36 (Untitled), 1975-1986…………………………………………………….…….532
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.37 Leonard Fink……………………………………………..…………..…………533
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center.
Figure 4.38 Leonard Fink……………………………..…………………………………..…534
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center.
Figure 4.39 Leonard Fink……………………………………………………………………535
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center.
Figure 4.40 Leonard Fink……………………………………………………………………536
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center.
Figure 4.41 Leonard Fink……………………………………………………………………537
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center.
Figure 4.42 Bull’s Eye, 1970……………………………………………………………...…538
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

xxxvii
Figure 4.43 “Ron O’Brien,” Art and Physique, 1956. Courtesy Gay, ……………………...539
Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society of
Northern California, San Francisco.
From Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship
& Homosexuality In Twentieth-Century American Art
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 173.
Figure 4.44 A prisoner's cell inside cell block 7 of Rikers Island in New…………..………540
York City on December 20, 1974.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Figure 4.45 (Untitled), 1975-1986……………………………………………………….….541
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.46 Photograph of assassinated mafia boss Paul Castellano…………………..……542
taken by Ruby Washington, in Selwyn Raab, “Authorities
Foresee Power Struggle,” New York Times, December 17,
1985, B4.
Figure 4.47 The uncropped version of the New York Times photograph of…………………543
Paul Castellano, taken on December 16, 1985 and published
the following day.
Ruby Washington -- New York Times
Figure 4.48 (Untitled), 1975-1986………………………………………………………..…544
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.49 (Untitled), 1975-1986………………………………………………………..…545
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie
Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. All rights reserved.
Figure 4.50 Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976………………………………546
Peter Hujar
Copyright 2024 The Peter Hujar Archive
Figure 4.51 Man in Polyester Suit, negative 1980; print 1981………………………………547
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

xxxviii
Figure 4.52 Calla Lily, 1984………………………………………………………………...548
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Figure 4.53 Ken Moody, 1984………………………………………………………….……549
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Figure 4.54 Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, 1984…………………………………...……550
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Figure 4.55 Hammerhead crane unloading forty-foot containers from…………………...…551
Asian ports. American President Lines terminal, Los
Angeles harbor, San Pedro, California, November 1992.
From Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995.
Allan Sekula
Figure 4.56 Man salvaging bricks from a demolished waterfront……………..……………552
warehouse. Rijnhaven. Rotterdam. The Netherlands.
September 1992. From Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995.
Allan Sekula
Figure 4.57 Dockers unloading a shipload of frozen fish from Argentina…………….…….553
From Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995.
Allan Sekula
Figure 4.57 A S&M bar scene in William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising………………….554
United Artists/Everett Collection
Figure 4.58 The interior of the men’s room in Mansfield’s Central Park,……………..……555
as printed in the FBI Enforcement Bulletin, June 1963. The
storage closet with the towel dispenser, which was used to
hide surveillance equipment, is visible in the back.
United States Department of Justice
Figure 4.59 Lieutenant Bill Spognardi manning a hidden camera in the……………………556
Central Park men’s room, as printed in the FBI Enforcement
Bulletin, June 1963.
United States Department of Justice
Figure 4.60 Still from surveillance film made by the Mansfield, Ohio………………..……557
police department in 1962 of gay sex in a public bathroom.
From William E. Jones, Tearoom. Los Angeles: 2nd

xxxix
Cannons Publications, 2008.
Figure 4.61 Still from surveillance film made by the Mansfield, Ohio…………………..…558
police department in 1962 of gay sex in a public bathroom.
From William E. Jones, Tearoom. Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons
Publications, 2008.
Figure 4.62 Barbara Faggins, “Teddy’s Transexual Passenger Talks!” ………………….…559
Jet May 31, 1982, 60-61.
Figure 4.63 The front side of Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag, repurposed…………………..…560
from a military-issued shoulder bag, on which Baltrop drew
a yin-yang symbol, swastikas, and other symbols.
Bronx Museum of Art
Figure 4.64 Untitled (reclining woman), 1956/57………………………………………...…561
Seydou Keïta
Courtesy CAAC—The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva ©
Seydou Keïta/IPM.
Figure 4.65 Untitled (Burning Pots), ca. 1919, watercolor, ink, and pencil……………...…562
on paper.
Awa Tsireh
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe
Figure 4.66 Untitled (Buffalo Dance) ca. 1918, watercolor on paper.………………………563
Awa Tsireh
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe
Figure 4.67 Flyer for Alvin Baltrop’s 1977 photography exhibition at The……………...…564
Glines, a gay non-profit arts center at 260 West Broadway,
Manhattan.
Figure 5.1 “Madrid, Spain 1933” ………………………………………………………….565
Henri Cartier-Bresson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive:
pro.magnumphotos.com
Figure 5.2 Pike County Court House, Pittsfield, Illinois, 1894-1895…………………...…566
Architect: Henry Elliott.
Reproduction number: LC-S35-TP8-2

xl
Tod Papageorge -- Seagram County Court House Archives /
Library of Congress
Figure 5.3 Installation view of the exhibition “Public Relations: Garry………………...…567
Winogrand.” October 18, 1977–December 11, 1977.
Kate Keller -- Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern
Art, New York.
Figure 5.4 Cover of Garry Winogrand’s book Stock Photographs: The………………..…568
Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, Austin: University
of Texas, 1980.
Figure 5.5 “A Story in the Sun,” Pageant, August 1955. Photographs……………………569
by Garry Winogrand.
Figure 5.6 “A Night at the Opera,” Infinity, November 1952…………………………..….570
Photographs by Garry Winogrand.
George Eastman House, International Museum of
Photography and Film.
Figure 5.7 Minsky's Burlesque, New Jersey, c. 1954…………………………….………..571
Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery
Figure 5.8 Advertisement for 100 Pipers Scotch, 1966……………………………………572
Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery
Figure 5.9 New York, ca. 1960…………………………………………………………..…573
Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery
Figure 5.10 “Five Unrelated Photographers,” Museum of Modern Art. ……………………574
May 28 - July 21, 1963.
Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Figure 5.11 Installation view of the exhibition “The Photographer's Eye,”.…………..……575
in the series, “Art in a Changing World: 1884-1964.” May
27, 1964–August 23, 1964.
Rolf Petersen -- Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern

xli
Art, New York.
Figure 5.12 “From the Picture Press” exhibition. January 30, 1973–April…………….……576
29, 1973.
Kate Keller -- Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
Figure 5.13 Phan Thi Kim Phuc (center) flees with other children after……………………577
South Vietnamese planes mistakenly dropped napalm on
South Vietnamese troops and civilians.
Nick Ut -- AP
Figure 5.14 Phan Thi Kim Phuc lies in bed as she undergoes laser…………………………578
treatments on the scars left from napalm burns, performed by
Jill S. Waibel MD at the Miami Dermatology and Laser
Institute on June 28, 2022 in Miami, Florida. Waibel says the
treatments will smooth and soften the pale, thick scar tissue
that ripples from her left hand up her arm, up her neck to her
hairline and down almost all of her back but more importantly
will relieve the deep aches and pains that plague her to this day.
Nick Ut -- Getty Images
Figure 5.15 Indian Point Nuclear Station on March 3, 1985 in Buchanan,…………………579
New York.
Santi Visalli -- Getty Images
Figure 5.16 The twin towers of the World Trade Center on the first………………………..580
morning of the power blackout of July 1977 in New York City.
Allan Tannenbaum -- Getty Images
Figure 5.17 Cover of New York Daily News, July 15, 1977 showing the…………...………581
Statue of Liberty still alight during the blackout.
Figure 5.18 Cover of New York Daily News, July 15, 1977 depicting a……………….……582
massive fire in Brooklyn.
Figure 5.19 Looters and residents of the Bushwick neighborhood run…………………...…583
down Broadway during the blackout in New York on July
14, 1977.
Tyrone Dukes -- New York Times/Redux

xlii
Figure 5.20 “Black Night of Our Soul,” New York Daily News, July 15, ……………..……584
1977.
Figure 5.21 “Heart of Darkness,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977…………………………...……585
Figure 5.22 “Blackout ‘77, Once More With Looting,” Time, July 25,.……………….……586
1977
Figure 5.23 On May 6, 1992, two people walk past a burned-out building…………………587
on Broadway and Gates Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, left
over from looting after the blackout in 1977. There was no
sign of rebirth in the devastated storefronts along Broadway.
Edward Keating -- New York Times/Redux
Figure 5.24 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………….…………588
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.25 Shea Stadium, New York, 1970………………………………………….……..589
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.26 Cotton Bowl (Notre Dame vs. Texas), Cotton Bowl Stadium,.…………...……590
Dallas, January 1, 1971.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.27 Little League World Series, Lamade Stadium, Williamsport,……………….…591
Pennsylvania,
August 26, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.28 Newspapers, Cincinnati, October 10, 1970…………………………….………592
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.

xliii
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.29 Movie theater, Columbus, Ohio November 20, 1970…………………..………593
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.30 “Is It True About Your Keeping Political Prisoners Caged Up?”…….……..…594
Washington Post, July 8, 1970.
Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress (007.18.00)
LC-DIG-hlb-07555 A 1970 Herblock Cartoon, © The Herb
Block Foundation
Figure 5.31 College football game (Michigan vs. Ohio State), Ohio……………….………595
Stadium, Columbus, November 21, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.32 Race day, Indianapolis 500, May 30, 1970………………………….….………596
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.33 Preakness Stakes, Pimlico racetrack, Baltimore, May 16, 1970…………….….597
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in
Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.34 Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of……………………..…598
Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.35 Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of…………………..……599
Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.36 Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of………………………..600
Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.

xliv
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.37 Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of………………..………601
Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.38 Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of………………..………602
Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.39 B1, May 6, 1980 issue of the New York Times, a copy of……………...………603
which is visible in Tod Papageorge’s photograph of three
women on a bench in Central Park, found in his book
Passing Through Eden.
Figure 5.40 Plate 41, showing profile headshots made with Alphonse………………..……604
Bertillon’s criminal portraiture system.
From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification Anthropométrique,
Paris: Ollier-Henry, 1893.
Figure 5.41 Illustrations showing some of the bodily measurements in……………….……605
Bertillon’s system.
From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification Anthropométrique,
Paris: Ollier-Henry, 1893.
Figure 5.42 “New York, 1967”…………………………………………………………...…606
Tod Papageorge--Danziger Gallery
Figure 5.43 Central Park Zoo, New York, 1967…………………………………….………607
Gary Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery
Figure 5.44 CBS Radio Playhouse Number 4. Originally known as the……………………608
Gallo Opera House at 254 West 54th Street, New York, NY.
April 13, 1944.
CBS via Getty Images
Figure 5.45 “Atlantic Expanding, Expedites Campaign,” Billboard,………………….……609
December 23, 1978: 90. Steve Rubell and Bianca Jagger at
Studio 54.

xlv
Sonia Moskowitz
Figure 5.46 Crowds gather outside Studio 54, hoping to gain admission.…………………..610
1978.
John Barrett -- PHOTOlink/Alamy
Figure 5.47 Studio 54 doorman Marc Benecke, shown on July 27, 1979,………………..…611
selects who will enter the nightclub. Allan Tannenbaum –
Getty Images
Figure 5.48 Studio 54’s entry hallway. 1977…………………………………………….….612
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy
Figure 5.49 Studio 54’s main bar. 1977………………………………………………..……613
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy
Figure 5.50 Studio 54's banquettes, as seen from the bar. Date unknown………………..…614
Jaime Ardiles-Arce
Figure 5.51 Studio 54’s dancefloor with kinetic lighting. 1978.……………………….……615
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink.net/MediaPunch/Alamy
Figure 5.52 Carmen D'Alessio, who led the design of Studio 54,……………………..……616
appears in New York in 1981.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy
Figure 5.53 From left, Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields, and…………………..617
Steve Rubell appear at Studio 54 in 1981.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy
Figure 5.54 The entryway of Studio 54 is decorated with faux trees……………………..…618
draped in Spanish moss. Date unknown.
John Kelly -- Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images
Figure 5.55 Behind the bar during a party to celebrate the one-year………..…..………..…619
anniversary of Studio 54, with special decorations from
fashion designer Issey Miyake (apple blossom-like plants
and gold screens) along with a combination entertainment/
fashion show with an “East Meets West” theme on April
26, 1978.

xlvi
Fairchild Archive/Penske Media via Getty Images
Figure 5.56 A model of the Titanic appears above the stage with clubbers…………………620
dancing below, at Studio 54. Date unknown.
John Kelly -- Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images
Figure 5.57 Grace Jones performs on New Year’s Eve 1977 at Studio 54………………….621
in New York City.
Sonia Moskowitz -- Getty Images
Figure 5.58 The photographer Brassaï at his desk in front of his………………………...…622
typewriter in his Paris apartment on April 20, 1970.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Figure 5.59 L'Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, 1939………………………………623
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery
Figure 5.60 Streetwalker near the Place d'Italie, c.1931.……………………………………624
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery
Figure 5.61 Female Couple, 1932…………………………………………………...………625
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery
Figure 5.62 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…626
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.63 Group in a Dance Hall,1932……………………………………………………627
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery
Figure 5.64 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…628
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.65 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…629
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.66 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………….…………630
Barker, 2014.

xlvii
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.67 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………….…………631
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.68 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…632
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.69 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………….…………633
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.70 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…634
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.71 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/………………….……635
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.72 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/………………….……636
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.73 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/………………….……637
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.74 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…638
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.75 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………………….…639
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.76 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/………………….……640
Barker, 2014.

xlviii
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.77 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/………………….……641
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.78 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/………………….……642
Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.79 Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda on a night out in New York……………….……643
City, circa 1969.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Figure 5.80 Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger attend the party for Reid Rogers………….……….644
on September 19, 1984 at Limelight in New York City.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Figure 5.81 Socialite Bianca Jagger, fashion designer Halston, producer……………..……645
Jack Haley, Jr. and actress/singer Liza Minnelli attend Studio
54's New Year's Eve Party on December 31, 1977 at Studio
54 in New York City.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Figure 5.82 Socialite Bianca Jagger, fashion designer Halston, producer……………..……646
Jack Haley, Jr. and actress/singer Liza Minnelli attend Studio
54's New Year's Eve Party on December 31, 1977 at Studio
54 in New York City.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Figure 5.83 Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/…………….…………647
Barker, 2014.
[The author circled Brooke Shields in red.]
Tod Papageorge
Figure 5.84 “Off the Screen,” People, May 29, 1978.………………………………………648
Figure 5.85 1966 Ivory soap advertisement, featuring Brooke Shields………………..……649
at right.
Francesco Scavullo

xlix
Figure 5.86 Advertisement for news segment titled “World’s Youngest……….……..……650
Sex Symbol?” using a cropped version of a 1975 photograph
of Brooke Shields by Francesco Scavullo
NBC News 4
Figure 6.1 A sequence of photographs of the March 7, 1970 eclipse on……..……………651
the front page of the March 8, 1970 issue of the New York Times.
Figure 6.2 New Yorkers view the April 7, 1970 eclipse through………….………………652
peepholes made in cardboard boxes worn over the head.
Mel Finkelstein -- New York Daily News
Figure 6.3 A young boy holds up a piece of exposed photographic film…….……….……653
he will use to safely view the total solar eclipse as he flies
to Nantucket, MA on March 7, 1970.
Charles Dixon -- Boston Globe via Getty Images
Figure 6.4 A man uses a telescope to project an image of the total solar…………….……654
eclipse onto a small screen in Nantucket, MA on March 7,
1970.
Charles Dixon -- Boston Globe via Getty Images
Figure 6.5 David Hammons’ “Day's End,” at Hudson River Park in New……..…….……655
York, May 13, 2021.
Simbarashe Cha -- New York Times / Redux
Figure 6.6 David Hammons’s initial sketch for “Day’s End,” sent to…………………..…656
Adam D. Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of
American Art, in 2014. The sculpture was completed in 2021.
David Hammons
Figure 6.7 The ground glass on the rear side of a 4x5” camera has a grid……….……..…657
faintly etched into it to help the photographer precisely
organize the visual elements of a photograph.
Alex Burke

l
Abstract
This dissertation considers a period of New York City’s history, 1965 to 1985, which witnessed
innumerable, sometimes catastrophic electrical failures, ruptures in the infrastructures of
transportation, and entertainment, as well as a historic decline in the standard of living, all set
against a crisis of faith in visual and textual journalism which remains with us to this day. The
four photographers discussed, René Burri, Bruce Davidson, Alvin Baltrop, and Tod Papageorge
imaged these fissures and in doing so revealed fissures within their own medium. Operating in a
grey zone between positivist certainty and postmodernist doubt, these photographers made
incomplete, questionable, and evasive records of their city.

1
INTRODUCTION
Electrified much more thoroughly, and sooner, than anywhere else in the United States or
Europe, New York City seemed to hold the promise of modernity -- the ability to harness
nature’s power in order to create dazzling and ever-changing phenomena.1 Much has been
written about New York City and artificial lighting by scholars such as William Sharpe, Sandy
Isenstadt, David Nye, Darcy Tell, and Kate Flint.2 The night had long been regulated, tamed, and
“disenchanted,” in the words of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, by the common streetlight.3 Throughout
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, it had become re-enchanted with the arrival of
the kindled pageantry that was skyscraper lighting, dancing incandescents, and the neon tube.
(Figure 1.1)
But there is another story to be told, the story of New York in the dark. Not only did the
period from 1965 to 1985 in New York City witness numerous, sometimes catastrophic electrical
failures, but it was also spoken of by countless observers as the figuratively “darkest” period of
the city’s long post-war decline, in that it was marked by a severe economic crisis, urban blight,
and surging crime, and in that it witnessed a marked increase in white flight and a corresponding
increase in people of color as a percentage of the city’s residents.4
1 William Chapman Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography,
1850-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 9. 2 See Sharpe. Sandy Isenstadt, Electric Light: An Architectural History. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018. David E.
Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Darcy
Tell, Times Square Spectacular: Lighting up Broadway. New York: Smithsonian Books / Collins: 2007. Kate Flint,
Flash! Photography, Writing, & Surprising Illumination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 3 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
4 “The Ten Worst Blackouts of the Last Fifty Years,” 2. Frank Lynn, “Koch Joins the Mayoral Contest; Questions
Beame's Competence,” New York Times, March 5, 1977, 1. See Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City
in Crisis Was Sold to the World. New York: Routledge, 2008. Charles Kaiser, “Blacks and Puerto Ricans a Bronx
Majority,” New York Times, April 19, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/19/archives/blacks-and-puertoricans-a-bronx-majority-study-finds-blacks-and.html.

2
Infrastructure
The city’s infrastructure, normally hidden or ignored, erupted into view as it began to
fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. The four photographers in this dissertation all pictured New
York City infrastructure emerging into visibility -- at the very same time as they helped make
photography as a medium -- a form of infrastructure in its own right -- visible. In his influential
article “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” anthropologist Brian Larkin defined
infrastructures as “matter that enable the movement of other matter…they are things and also the
relation between things.”5 Such a definition decenters the final product and emphasizes the
mechanisms that helped get it to its destination.6 The conceptual roots of infrastructure lie, he
argues, in the Enlightenment idea of a world in which people, materials, and ideas circulate
freely, creating opportunities for progress.7 New technologies allowed humankind to control the
flow of water, and later electricity. Other technologies permitted humankind to escape the
bounds of their own bodies by launching them through the air or under water, by allowing them
to communicate across great distances, and with the advent of photography, by allowing them to
freeze, multiply and distribute vision.8
Societies create infrastructures, but, by shaping the experience of their users,
infrastructures also recreate societies.9 Infrastructures are, in part, the result of human behavior,
5 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 329. 6 For a consideration of how this would look when applied to the field of art, see Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Networks
Technology, Mobility, and Mediation in Visual Culture.” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 104-109. 7 Larkin, 332.
8 Infrastructure, however, is more than just a collection of airplanes, submarines, or cameras. In recent decades,
inspired by Latour’s actor-network theory, scholars have broadened the definition of infrastructure considerably, as
when Jane Bennett described the electrical grid as “a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer
programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static,
legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood.” Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North
American Blackout,” Public Culture 17, no. 3 (2005): 448. 9 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November 1999):
381.

3
but they also influence human behavior.10 For example, in a country in which electricity is
available for only a few hours a day, infrastructure helps determine when people wake up, go to
sleep, and begin and end work.11 Infrastructure tends to consist of, in sociologist Susan Leigh
Star’s words, “singularly unexciting” things, and yet can sometimes inspire deep affective
responses.12 For example, roads, which in industrialized countries tend to be flat, minimalist
strips of grey matter laid on top of dirt, inspired Jack Kerouac’s exhilarated, madcap search for
transcendence in midcentury America. Infrastructures permit but also restrain, and not simply in
the way a street allows one to drive to the supermarket but not to the bottom of the ocean.13 As
one scholar suggests, Robert Moses deliberately designed overpasses on Long Island to be too
low for buses -- often carrying lower-income people -- to enter upper-income neighborhoods.14
It is incorrect to argue, as many scholars do, that infrastructure is by definition invisible.15
Instead, it is better to follow Bruce Mau’s lead and say that designers often want their products
“to become invisible, to be…absorbed into the background” -- while acknowledging that this
does not always happen.16 Even in the cases outlined by David Nye of intentionally exciting
infrastructures such as grand bridges or dazzling urban lighting, the sublime becomes stale, or at
10 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November
1999): 381.
11 Ibid. 12 Ibid, 377. Larkin, 332-333. 13 Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, And Social Organization In The History Of
Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 191.
14 Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (January 1980): 123-124. He based his
argument on Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books,
1975), 951-952. 15 Larkin, 336. Larkin provides the following examples of scholarship in which infrastructure is defined by
invisibility: Star, 377-391. Stephen J. Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Julia Elyachar, “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of
Empowerment in Cairo.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (August 2010): 452-464. Steve Graham and Simon
Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition.
Oxford: Routledge, 2001. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
16 Less commonly, an element of infrastructure such as the Brooklyn Bridge was designed to be, and remains,
spectacular. Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard, Massive Change (London: Phaidon, 2003), 3.

4
least ordinary, over time.17 According to Vanessa Schwartz’ study of the jet age, the commercial
jet’s arrival caused a sensation -- in part because the smoothly running engines did not cause any
sensation -- until it too became routine, and then during the 1967 to 1972 heyday of skyjackings,
horribly visible again.18 Infrastructure is most visible when it first appears, disappears, or
breaks.19
This dissertation considers historical examples of infrastructure coming into visibility, as
photographed by four different photographers. René Burri photographed electrical infrastructure
during the 1965 Northeast Blackout. Bruce Davidson photographed one element of
transportation infrastructure -- specifically the New York City subway. Alvin Baltrop
photographed another -- the shipping piers lining southeast Manhattan. These examples are easy
to identify as infrastructure. They are all things which allow other things, such as electrons,
people, and goods, to move. The electrical network is embedded deeply within other structures,
and becomes visible mainly when it ceases to function.20 It does not have to be reconstructed
each time we use it.21 It has great reach.22 It does not appear fully formed, but grows out in
segments from a central source.23 All of these same things can be said of the subway and the
pier, but the subway also tends to produce a predictable, self-protective emotional response in its
users, while the pier in its decayed state also induces powerful emotional reactions -- but, as we
will see, of an altogether different sort.24
17 See David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1996. 18 See the introduction and conclusion to Vanessa R. Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
19 Mike Owen Benediktsson, In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York
City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 6-7. 20 Star, 381-382. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 For a classic study of the effect of the urban environment on affect, see Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and
Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409-24.

5
Why the disco, the fourth site examined in this dissertation, qualifies as infrastructure is
less obvious, but will become more so. One reason is that disco and its many subcultures are
governed by norms. In the subculture Douglas Crimp belonged to, a norm of hyper-fitness
produced “identical bodies…strikingly different from other bodies… [which] have been made
into dancing machines.”25 Additionally, a vibrant “pharmaculture,” in the words of one music
editor, gave dancers the energy and disinhibition for what Crimp terms “serious discoing.”26
Such was the distinctive power of this infrastructure to constitute a culture that one glance out
the doorway of a disco at 7am on a Sunday brought instant revulsion: “views of reality look
unreal, nightmarish, tacky,” Crimp wrote. “Going outside is always a shock, and it takes days to
readjust to ugly reality.”27
More importantly, discos were sites of movement, both within individual venues and
between venues. Crimp describes the experience of dancing non-stop for hours on end as similar
to “what happens in distance running or swimming. You pass a point where you’re beyond tired,
beyond pain, beyond even thinking about stopping, thinking only that this could go on forever
and you’d love it.”28 Matched in endurance, the DJ creates seamless, unscrolling music with the
use of side-by-side turntables.29 Music writer Vince Aletti’s description of the result conjures
visions of flowing electricity or water: “a structure of repetitive, flowing patterns and peaks,
waves that shift, crest, and break, carrying the spirits of the dancers with them.”30 (Other
infrastructures of circulation also intersected with disco. For example, record companies eager to
25 Douglas Crimp, “Disss-Co (A Fragment) From Before Pictures, a Memoir of 1970s New York,” Criticism 50, no.
1 (Winter 2008): 6.
26 Vince Aletti, The Disco Files 1973-78: New York's Underground, Week by Week (New York: D.A.P., 2018), 34.
Crimp, 12.
27 Crimp, 6. 28 Crimp, 3. 29 Aletti, 15. 30 Aletti, 27.

6
get their albums into circulation started the free Record Pool, which handed out LPs to almost
200 New York City DJs.)31
In 1975, about 200-300 discos in New York City hosted an estimated 200,000 dancers
each week.32 The most widely-publicized venues, scattered across Manhattan south of Central
Park, included places such as Studio 54, Flamingo, Regine’s, Les Mouches, New York New
York, Ones, Tribeca, and Infinity.33 Dancers and DJs cycled through these venues in part due to
thrill-seeking, and in part due to necessity: gay discos in particular were frequently shut down or
burnt down, or simply fell out of fashion, and rarely lasted more than six months.34 (For this
contingent of dancers, therefore, the churning disco infrastructure remained highly visible.) Due
to the constant movement in and in between discos, they are often collectively referred to as a
“circuit” -- again, evoking the image of electricity.35
Studio 54, the disco at the center of chapter three, formed a spectacular choke point in the
circuit of New York City discos. Restricting entry to a nightclub is an old trick for ensuring its
popularity. A 1931 nonfiction book Nightclubs includes the story of cabaret singer Florence
Mills, whose team used the strategy with smashing success.36 But Studio 54 was different. Coowner Steve Rubell bragged in one 1977 interview that he’d recently turned away 1,400 people
in one night.37 According to frequent guest Andy Warhol, Rubell even once turned away
someone holding a gun, intent on robbing the place, by saying “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no
31 Aletti, 12. 32 Aletti, 11. 33 Anna Quindlen, “What's New in the Discotheques,” New York Times, November 11, 1977,
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/11/archives/new-jersey-weekly-whats-new-in-the-discotheques-whats-new-inthe.html.
34 Crimp, 3, 5. 35 See Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979. Durham: Duke
University Press Books, 2004.
36 Jimmy Durante, Night Clubs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 176. 37 Dan Dorfman, “The Eccentric Whiz Behind Studio 54,” New York, November 7, 1977, 14.

7
room. You can’t get in tonight.”38 A photograph from 1978 shows the kind of large crowd which
would routinely form -- in this case, in the rain -- hoping to gain admission. (Figure 1.2) Brooke
Shields recalls the mixture of excitement and guilt she would feel when being whisked to the
head of the line at Studio 54:
When we arrived at the club, I always cringed inside once I saw the mob. I’d wade
through the throngs of people to reach the rope, which would suddenly be
dramatically lifted, like a magician pulling off a cape to reveal the rabbit in the hat.
I would apologize to those waiting as I was ushered ahead of them. The flashes
blinding me helped mask the looks of rejection from the crowd.39
Tales abound of people’s outrageous attempts at gaining access, and their fury upon
being denied. One man used mountain-climbing gear to lower himself three stories down from
an adjacent building, only to fall and break his neck.40 After being turned away, another man
choked the doorman.41 Another man crashed his Oldsmobile into the VIP entrance.42 Another
man pointed a rifle out of a moving car at the front door.43 The security guards were so anxious
to avoid being showered with glass bottles that they cleared potential weapons from garbage cans
for several blocks around the club.44 Studio 54 itself had not “broken” -- that would come soon
enough, when the owners were jailed for tax evasion in 1980 -- but the frictionless movement of
bodies through the disco circuit had. Like the other forms of infrastructure discussed above, this
one came into visibility as it came apart.
38 Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's Exposures (London: Arrow, 1980), 50. 39 Brooke Shields, There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (New York: Plume Books, 2014),
chap. 9, e-book. 40 Anthony Haden-Guest, The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night (New York: Open Road,
2009), 132.
41 Ibid 133. 42 Ibid 134. 43 Ibid 134. 44 Ibid 133.

8
Journalism
This dissertation is concerned with the postwar history of New York City, but it is also
concerned with ways of knowing and picturing that history. Journalism is one such method, and,
like the subjects of these four chapters, it too is a form of infrastructure. Its claim to
infrastructure-status is straightforward. It is a communication system, to borrow from Vanessa
Schwartz and Jason Jill, “with a commitment to transmit timely and reliable information held by
journalists to be of consequence to a viewing public.”45 What circulates through its passageways
is not people or goods, but knowledge. When it underwent its own crisis, it too became visible in
a way it had not been before.
In the years following World War II, a momentous shift in the history of American
journalism occurred, one which helped hold power to account, but which also opened deep
fissures within the institution, and severely degraded public trust in it.46 Over time, this crisis
ensnared more and more of the media landscape, from network television to newspapers, to
magazines, and photography. Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, editors and journalists at US
newspapers operated under the professional norm of objectivity in their news coverage. They
wanted to create, or appear to create, unbiased reports of events free of subjective values. To do
this, they sought to find verifiable answers to the questions of who, what, when, where, and how,
and in doing so, act as transparent conduits of truth.47 Trying to answer “why” a given event had
taken place -- interpreting the news -- was at the time considered too close to taking an
45 Jason Hill & Vanessa Schwartz, “General Introduction,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News,
ed. Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4.
46 See Matthew Pressman, “Objectivity and Its Discontents: The Struggle for the Soul of American Journalism in the
1960s and 1970s.” In Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, edited by Bruce J. Schulman
and Julian E. Zelizer, 96-113. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 47 Pressman, 23.

9
ideological position.48 (To say that this was a norm is not to claim that professionals actually
achieved it, or even appeared to achieve it; as Peter Galison writes, “journalistic objectivity has,
for its entire history, been always already disputed.”49) But the profession’s relationship with
objectivity changed in the coming years. It changed in part due to the pressure to differentiate
newspapers from the newly arrived radio, and later television, neither of which handled longform investigation well. It changed in part due to the understanding, espoused first by Walter
Lippmann and later by Henry Luce, that bare facts alone can be misleading. It changed in part
because an increasingly complex world and an increasingly educated readership required a new
kind of journalism. And it changed in part due to a bewildering new force in American politics.50
Senator Joseph McCarthy (Figure 1.3) was a tool of large business who lacked the
respect of his colleagues, who was widely known to be indolent, uninformed, unprepared, and
rambling, readily swayed by the last person with whom he had spoken. He lied constantly, even
without reason, tried to block an adversarial newspaper from his press conferences, and
encouraged his supporters to harass its reporters at rallies. Yet he had the benefit of ready access
to money, the support of a media conglomerate which transmitted his nonsense to millions, and a
loyal public following about whom the pollster George Gallup once wrote, “even if it were
known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with
him.”51 Many journalists could see through the bluster but felt fettered by their profession’s
48 For an analysis of objectivity and the New York City tabloid PM which attempted to teach its readers an
alternative, see Jason E. Hill, The Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture. Oakland:
University of California Press, 2018. Pressman, 23.
49 Peter Galison, “The Journalist, the Scientist, and Objectivity,” in Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives from
Science and Technology Studies, ed. Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson, and Jonathan Y. Tsou (New York: Springer,
2015), 73.
50 Ibid 24, 29, 31, 32. 51 For a study of McCarthy and his present-day counterpart, see Larry Tye, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow
of Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

10
norms and unable to challenge McCarthy.52 A few, such as radio commentator Elmer Davis,
spoke up. “Dead-pan objectivity” devoid of analysis, he said in 1953, “makes the news business
merely a transmission belt for pretentious phonies.”53
The shift towards a more interpretive, adversarial form of journalism (usually in
magazines) picked up speed the year after McCarthy’s fall from grace during the 1954 ArmyMcCarthy hearings.54 As a result, the years 1960 to 1980 are often written about in retrospect as
a golden age of journalism in the US, in which journalists stepped out from under their editors in
order to bring readers a richer understanding of world events.55 Important for this dissertation is
the fact that in this same period, designers started running photographs significantly larger on the
page; photography, in other words, was very much part of this conversation.56 (Figures 1.4 &
1.5)
The ensuing, often angry battles between readers, journalists, and politicians on both the
political left and right over whether to retain, redefine, or even do away with objectivity led to a
precipitous long-lasting decline in audiences’ trust in the media. Heather Hendershot argues that
coverage of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention marked a turning point.57 Anti52 Pressman, 27. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid 26. 55 Ironically, this was also an era of great loss for journalism. The demise of New York City-based magazines such
as Saturday Evening Post in 1969, Look in 1971, and Life in 1972 has been written about extensively, but it is
important to note that this trend had begun affecting New Yorkers several years earlier, with the demise -- in 1966
alone -- of the newspapers the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Journal American, and the New York WorldTelegram & Sun. Raymond Mccaffrey, “Barry H. Gottehrer and a ‘City in Crisis,’” Journalism History 44, no. 3
(2018): 169. Jill Lepore, “Does Journalism Have a Future?” New Yorker, January 21, 2019,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does-journalism-have-a-future. Matthew Pressman, “Objectivity
and Its Discontents: The Struggle for the Soul of American Journalism in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Media Nation:
The Political History of News in Modern America, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 96.
56 Pressman, 3. 57 As Eric Foner notes in a review, the country was already highly polarized by this point. Perhaps a better way to
frame the Chicago event would have been to argue that it crystallized already extant divisions. Eric Foner, “Seeing
Was Not Believing,” New York Review of Books, September 21, 2023,

11
war protestors had marched through the city without a permit and blocked traffic, and in return,
police had brutally attacked them with teargas and clubs.58 (Figure 1.6) Television news crews
broadcast footage of these events, which were corroborated by photographic and eyewitness
testimony; networks and editors were deluged with irate letters and telegrams from viewers
accusing them of siding with what people termed the “subversives,” “communists,” and
“hippies.”59 Surely there was footage of these protestors attacking the police somewhere, and yet,
the thinking went, liberal media executives must have suppressed it.60 From here, the once-fringe
notion of left-wing media bias swept the nation.61
Richard Nixon had the important insight that he could win the Presidency by challenging
the media -- that critical check on government power upon which, as Thomas Jefferson once
wrote, “our liberty depends.”62 Or as Nixon put it, it is “good politics for us to kick the press
around.”63 His team planted anti-network letters of complaint in newspapers, harassed and
wiretapped reporters and broke into their homes, and used government regulators to intimidate
media companies.64 As Watergate threatened his presidency, Nixon spent far more time lashing
out at the press than addressing the accusations. Although in his particular case the tactic failed,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/09/21/seeing-was-not-believing-when-the-news-broke-hendershot. Heather
Hendershot, When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2022), 8.
58 Ibid 8, 18, 19. 59 Ibid 8. 60 Ibid. 61 This argument was common in the mid-century South, where CBS was often called, among other things, the Coon
Broadcasting Company. White southerners often accused the national media of one-sided coverage, although what
the “other side” to a story of police siccing attack dogs on black children in Birmingham might be is unclear. Ibid
16, 17.
62 Jefferson to James Currie, January 28, 1786, Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, Series 1:
General Correspondence. 1651-1827. Microfilm Reel: 005, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib001765. 63 Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew fired the warning shot in a speech given on November 14, 1969 in which he
lambasted media elites -- a “tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one” who control a “virtual
monopoly of a whole medium of communication.” Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack
Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 129. Dale L.
Cressman, “Agnew, ABC, and Richard Nixon’s War on Television,” Journalism History 47, no. 1 (2021): 35. 64 Hendershot, 329.

12
the effect on public trust in the media was lasting. The bomb-throwing Joseph McCarthy helped
produce a splintered and quarrelsome -- and highly visible -- media landscape, casting both the
written word and the image into doubt for decades to come.
Photography
As with disco discussed above, my argument for photography’s status as infrastructure
needs explanation. First, as Howard Becker shows us, photographs (and artworks more broadly)
are part of complex infrastructures along with dealers, consumers, critics, and suppliers.65
Secondly, the camera is itself a site of movement in which light enters, altering the chemical
composition of film, after which the film is removed, prints are made and then circulated. The
photograph can be such a site as well; Vanessa Schwartz shows us how Ernst Haas embraced
motion and camera blur in his photography in order to evoke the lived experience of his sped-up
world.66 Photography affects human behavior; norms govern what the photographer can and
cannot photograph, and the presence of a camera alters behavior in front of the lens as well.67
Discursive claims about photography link it to the same Enlightenment ideals expressed by other
kinds of infrastructure. Despite the fact that the camera is little more than a black box with a
timer, it can still produce tremendous emotional responses. To the casual observer, photography
is invisible; what one often sees upon looking at a photograph is a referent, not a
representation.68 The four photographers in this dissertation demonstrate, in different ways, how
photographs lost their transparency at this moment in history and became visible as objects unto
65 See Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 66 See chapter four in Vanessa R. Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2020.
67 See Peter Buse, The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016. 68 As Barthes wrote, “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is
not it that we see.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 6.

13
themselves. Their claim to transmit the light of knowledge was replaced with the opaque
darkness of uncertainty.
This dissertation examines photographs of New York City in the dark, whether the dark
of an electrical blackout, a subway, a pier, or a disco. But it also examines a kind of metaphorical
darkness within the genre of documentary photography itself -- a kind of unknowing. The noun
“blackout” has a rich history of metaphorical usage in a wide array of scenarios beyond optical
darkness, often linked to epistemology. Since 1850, English speakers have used it variously to
indicate censorship, memory loss, loss of consciousness, loss of radio reception, and the
suppression of news.69
If this dissertation considers the theme of “unknowing” in photography, one must first
define “knowing.” “The entire history of our philosophy,” wrote Jacques Derrida in 1967, “is a
photology.”70 To the ancient Greeks, only visibility offered certainty.71 The eyes, Heraclitus
argued, are “more exact witnesses than ears,” and in fact, the audible can only be trusted when
verified by the visible.72 In the Middle Ages, Truth was thought to shine on its own, as
penetrating and self-evident as the Sun’s rays.73 Enlightenment thinkers found that notion
naive.74 They believed Truth was weak and needed human agents to provide the necessary light
to uncover it.75 Light was no longer homogenous, but could be manipulated and directed to lead
an audience to Truth -- or to falsity.76 Darkness and light have served as metaphors for ignorance
69 John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), www.oed.com.
70 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (New York: Routledge, 2005), 31. 71 Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept
Formation,” in History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, ed. Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe
Paul Kroll (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 156.
72 Ibid. 73 Ibid 166. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid 169.

14
and knowledge for thousands of years in the West. Even as the conception of Truth and our
access to it have changed, the terms have often remained the same.
Photography’s connection to light is self-evident, and shows up in 19th century
descriptions of the medium as “sunbeam art,” “pictures of light,” and “sun-painting” among
countless other examples.77 Edgar Allan Poe was an early example of an observer connecting
Truth to light and in turn to photography when he described the daguerreotype as “infinitely
more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands” (emphasis in the original)
and a source of “absolute truth.”78 Oliver Wendell Holmes believed the fruits of “the honest
sunshine” would hold up “in a court of law.”79 Socially-minded photographers such as Lewis
Hine took “light” as a metaphor, rotated it 180 degrees, and used it to “illuminate” social ills for
a public audience. (Figure 1.7) As he put it, “the dictum…of the social worker is ‘Let there be
light;’ and in this campaign for light we have for our advance agent the light writer -- the
photograph.”80 By this seemingly natural or automatic process, it was thought, photography
achieved a kind of mechanical objectivity and could thus help reveal the world.81
77 Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil: or, The Heliographic Art (Pawlet, VT: Helios, 1971), 5.
Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 86. Ibid.
78 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven:
Leete's Island Books, 1980), 38.
79 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Doings of the Sunbeam,” in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont
Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 73. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the
Stereograph,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980),
78.
80 Lewis W. Hine, “Social Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven:
Leete's Island Books, 1980), 112.
81 Unknowing has been frequently linked to darkness, especially during the Enlightenment. Joseph Addison,
journalist and founder of the Spectator in order “to dissipate the ignorance of the public” as if it were a raincloud.
The historian William Robertson described the early Middle Ages as a time in which “the ignorance of the age was
too powerful…the darkness returned and settled over Europe, more thick and heavy than before.” Philosopher Mary
Astell argued that a college for women might “expel that cloud of Ignorance” that kept women in line. Unknowing
has also been linked to darkness and further on to photography, as when Talbot referred to “the secrets of the
darkened [camera] chamber.” Using rather purple prose, Wendell Holmes described the (usually hidden) photo
negative as a “perverse and totally depraved” object from which “some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all
things from their properties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the deepest blackness was gilded with the
brightest glare.” Peter Burke, Ignorance: A Global History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 36. Ibid. Ibid

15
The socially constructed connection between photography and knowledge has a history.
Robin Kelsey’s and Blake Stimson’s “Photography’s Double Index (A Short History in Three
Parts)” traces society’s acceptance of photographic positivism, from its pinnacle in the late 19th
century as demonstrated by scientific, artistic, and socially-minded photography, to its postWorld War II nadir as scholars and critics revealed the medium’s implication in propaganda,
war, and civil rights abuses.82 Criticism of photography’s truth-telling ability came not just from
the right, as it did at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but from the left as well,
not just from those in the world of politics but also from intellectuals, and not just in the States,
but from abroad as well. During a fractured time in France marked both by great economic
prosperity and the last gasps of doomed imperial adventures first in Vietnam and later in Algeria,
Roland Barthes deconstructed photography’s mechanisms of meaning in his essays “The
Photographic Message” (1961) and “The Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), arguing that
photography’s indexicality had allowed its users to pass off rhetoric as unvarnished fact.83 By
helping to naturalize one’s position, Barthes wrote, photography had proven itself not to be a tool
of enlightenment but of ideology. When Barthes’ ideas were first published in English translation
in 1977, they would become influential for academics in the United States. A warning shot closer
to home had come in the form of Daniel Boorstin’s still essential The Image: A Guide to PseudoEvents in America (1962), in which he examined the artifice of many of the so-called news
37. William Henry Fox Talbot, “The Pencil of Nature,” in Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed.
Mike Weaver (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1993), 92. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 55. Robin Kelsey and
Blake Stimson, “Introduction: Photography’s Double Index (A Short History in Three Parts)” in The Meaning of
Photography, ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008),
xi.
82 Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson. “Introduction: Photography’s Double Index (A Short History in Three Parts).”
In The Meaning of Photography, edited by Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, vii-xxxi. Williamstown: Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008.
83 France lost its Vietnamese colony in 1954, and its Algerian colony in 1962. See Roland Barthes, “The
Photographic Message.” In Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the
Image” in Image, Music, Text, 32-51. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

16
events populating American media, leading to a public ill-informed about the world around
them.
Ironically, at the same time as photography’s socially constructed evidentiary value was
under attack, imaging devices’ technological ability to pierce optical darkness was actually
radically increasing. In 1965, US combat troops first arrived in Vietnam carrying so-called
starlight scopes, six pounds in weight and mounted atop their weapons.84 (Figure 1.8) By
amplifying starlight, moonlight, and sky glow, the devices improved soldiers’ range of vision
from 50 meters with the naked eye to 300 meters.85 During the Apollo Moon-landing program,
NASA hired German lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss to create a 50mm lens with the truly gigantic
maximum aperture of f/0.7.86 (Figure 1.9) Revealed to the public in 1966, this lens could open up
many times wider than even many high-end lenses available today, taking in many more
photons, and allowing the camera to record detail even in darkest space.87 Film director Stanley
Kubrick later repurposed the lens to shoot interior scenes lit only by candle -- unheard of at the
time -- for his 1975 period drama “Barry Lyndon.”88 (Figure 1.10) In 1976, Fuji introduced the
first ever 400 ISO high-speed color 35mm film, which worked four times as well in low light as
the closest competitor, introduced twelve years prior.89 Kodak released the first 1000 ISO film in
1982, which in turn worked two and a half times as well as Fuji’s film.90 And in 1984, Fuji
introduced a 1600 ISO film, which was 60% faster than Kodak’s film.91 In 1979, Canon released
84 See Richard A. Ruth, “The Secret of Seeing Charlie in the Dark: The Starlight Scope, Techno-anxiety, and the
Spectral Mediation of the Enemy in the Vietnam War.” Vulcan 5 (2017): 64-88. 85 Ibid. 86 Geoffrey Crawley, “Technical Advances At 'photokina' 1966: Carl Zeiss Oberkochen,” The British Journal of
Photography. Vol. 113, Iss. 5543, (Oct 14, 1966): 908. 87 Ibid. 88 Ed Digiulio, “Two Special Lenses For ‘Barry Lyndon,’” American Cinematographer Vol. 57, Iss. 3, (Mar 1976),
318.
89 George Ashton, “World Round-up,” The British Journal of Photography (Dec 14, 1984): 1330. 90 “Kodacolor VR1000.” The British Journal of Photography Vol. 129, Iss. 6378, (Oct 29, 1982): 1163. 91 Michael Peres, “Profiles of Selected Photographic Film and Digital Companies,” in The Focal Encyclopedia of
Photography, ed. Michael Peres (New York: Routledge, 2007), 307.

17
the AF 35M autofocus camera. While not the first autofocus camera, it was the first such camera
that could, if necessary, focus the lens in complete darkness, by using an infrared beam to judge
distance.92 These remarkable technological advances allowed new kinds of photographs to be
made.
Perhaps the last major and broadly accepted expression of photographic positivism came
in the form of Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called The
Family of Man. Examining this project will provide a historically specific understanding of
photographic truth from a moment just before the time period covered in this dissertation. This
will demonstrate what “knowing” looked like, and provide a baseline against which we might
better understand what “unknowing” looked like.
Over four years, Steichen and his team found photographs for the exhibition by visiting
photographers in person across the US and Europe, contacting agencies such as Magnum, and --
importantly -- scouring the archives of Life magazine.93 In his 1952 book Words and Pictures,
Wilson Hicks, the photo editor of Life and later its executive editor, demonstrated that he was
fully aware of how a photojournalist’s choice of subject matter, framing, and more form a
subjective interpretation of a given event, and how many photojournalists aspired to art in their
images. Yet he also wrote that “reality is the master of the photographer” and that the
photographer must “tell the truth as nearly as he can.”94 Later on, scholars such as Erika Doss
and Eric Sandeen noted that both producers and consumers of Life photography in this period
92 L. Andrew Mannheim, “Canon Af 35M Towards Ultimate Automation?” The British Journal of Photography.
Vol. 126, Iss. 6223, (Nov 2, 1979): 1050.
93 A significant number of the images which made it into the final round came from Life, which proved to be more
useful for Steichen’s purposes than the competing magazine Look. Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The
Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 9. “The Family of Man
at Clervaux Castle,” Steichen Collections, accessed July 17, 2024, https://steichencollectionscna.lu/eng/collections/1_the-family-of-man. 94 Wilson Hicks, Words and Pictures (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 14, 136.

18
believed that photographs were “simple…and unproblematic didactic tools” which contained “a
clearly inscribed meaning.”95 James Guimond exaggerates only slightly in claiming “readers
could indeed believe the camera was a magic eye enabling them to imagine they were seeing and
conquering the world.”96 Perhaps it is no wonder Life journalist Dora Hamblin once half-jokingly
referred to a camera-toting colleague as “God the Photographer.”97 This positivist understanding
of photography informed many of the photographs which went into The Family of Man.
As Sandeen observes, these assumptions driving Steichen’s exhibition showed up earlier
in his life, as when he would instruct his portrait subjects in the 1920s to “forget themselves for
an instant and be themselves,” or in his obsessive, sweeping use of aerial photography during
World War II.98 Photographs revealed stable meanings, and added up, like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle, to a larger truth.99
Allan Sekula notes the way the exhibition’s organizers repeat a litany of statistics:
Five hundred and three pictures taken by 273 photographers in 68 countries were
chosen from 2 million solicited submissions and organized by a single, illustrious
editorial authority into a show that was seen by 9 million citizens in 69 countries in
85 separate exhibitions, and into a book that sold at least 4 million copies by
1978.100
In poet Carl Sandburg’s prologue to the catalogue, he compares the project to a
“multiplication table of living breathing human faces.”101 While Sekula raises these points in
95 Erika Doss, “Introduction: Looking at Life: Rethinking America’s Favorite Magazine, 1936-1972,” in Looking at
Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001), 11. Sandeen, 19. 96 James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991), 152.
97 Dora Hamblin, That Was The Life (New York: Norton, 1977), 48. 98 Sandeen, 2. 99 Ibid 179. 100 Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal, 41 no. 1 (Spring 1981): 20. 101 Ibid.

19
order to accuse Steichen of completing “an aestheticized job of global accounting” as part of a
neocolonial enterprise, what matters for us is instead their unmistakable scientistism.102
The four photographers in this dissertation worked at a time in which Family of Man’s
optimistic view of humankind’s mutual goodwill, and of photography’s ability to transmit a clear
and stable truth to viewers, would be tested as never before. René Burri was a Swiss
documentary photographer and member of Magnum Photo agency. He began taking reportage
assignments from magazines at a young age, and by his mid-twenties, he had traveled around the
world. He found a mentor in the achingly sincere humanist photographer Werner Bischof, and
later in Henri Cartier-Bresson, both of whom had participated in Edward Steichen’s landmark
1955 exhibition “The Family of Man” at MoMA.103 In the years leading up to the 1965 Northeast
blackout, Burri had established himself as a master of the telephoto lens. I read the radically
compressed and bounded spaces of these telephoto lens images as a kind of architecture (a field
familiar to him through his architectural photographer teacher Hans Finsler as well as his own
decades-long documentation of architects such as Le Corbusier) one which he used to bind the
far reaches of a given scene to that which was closest, creating awe-inspiring, seemingly allencompassing scenes of human figures -- often non-Westerners -- within landscapes. I argue that
these audacious, if proprietorial, compositions are an expression of the optimistic, but ultimately
ahistorical, postwar humanism which had been passed down to Burri by figures such as his close
mentor Werner Bischof, who had previously participated in “The Family of Man.” However, the
1965 blackout, the largest in world history at the time, stymied Burri’s mastery of deep space.
102 Ibid. 103 Peter Halter, “Werner Bischof: a Portrait of the Artist as Photo-journalist,” History of Photography 22, no. 3
(1998): 237. Hans-Michael Koetzle, “Introduction,” in René Burri Photographs, ed. Hans-Michael Koetzle
(London: Phaidon, 2007), 21. See Edward Steichen, The Family of Man. New York: Museum of Modern Art /
Simon and Schuster, 1955.

20
Burri’s epistemic overreach, exemplified by his telephoto images, was, for one night at least,
replaced by a profound unknowing. This unknowing registered both formally and
iconographically, and made visible the material basis of both photography and human vision.
Before continuing, it might be helpful to recount an anecdote involving Burri in order to
give an example of ruptures within a photographic infrastructure that is more specific and closerto-home. The photography giant Eastman Kodak was one of many companies which built a
pavilion at the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. Over twenty exhibits within its pavilion displayed every
kind of photograph from X-rays to portraiture (and a Family of Man-style exhibit entitled “The
World and Its People”) -- as well as a photograph Burri took at the Frankfurt, Germany railroad
station in 1962.104 (Figure 1.11) The two-story building featured an undulating white roof deck
designed to evoke the lunar surface and offer photo opportunities for visitors.105 (Figure 1.12)
Indeed, catering to amateur photographers -- and hastening the seemingly endless
democratization of the medium -- was a central goal of the pavilion. About thirty Kodak experts
were on hand to explain each stage of making photographs, show the latest equipment, and
diagnose minor mechanical issues with visitors’ cameras.106 Apparently, the most common
problem visitors faced was with loading film.107 This was a conundrum Kodak had tried to
address with its new Instamatic camera, advertised on the back of its pamphlet “Kodak At The
Fair: Under The Picture Tower A World Of Adventure In The Kodak Pavilion.” The ad promised
104 Jacob Deschin, “World Contest: Color Event for the Fair Announced by Kodak,” New York Times, August 18,
1963, 18. Walter Carlson, “Kodak Provides Fair with Color,” New York Times, August 7, 1964, 14. J.C. “More than
Surface Pictures,” New York Times, September 20, 1964, 32. 105 Kodak even published a pamphlet called “Picturetaking at The Fair,” with advice on which subjects around the
fairgrounds to photograph, how to use flash, and how to expose properly in different conditions. See Picturetaking
at The Fair: Miniature and Other Advanced Cameras. Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Company, 1964. Jacob
Deschin, “Kodak at the Fair: Novel Pavilion Has Varied Programs of Shows and Picture Services,” New York Times,
April 19, 1964, 21.
106 Walter Carlson, “Kodak Provides Fair with Color,” New York Times, August 7, 1964, 14. 107 Ibid.

21
users “instant-loading, just drop film in, with no threading, no fumbling.”108 (Figure 1.13) Unlike
the film Burri would fumble with the night of the coming blackout, Instamatic film had a notch
cut into the outside of the cartridge by which users could tell its sensitivity -- even in the dark.109
Crowning the pavilion was a spectacular display of five photographs, each measuring
thirty by thirty-six feet, making them the largest in the world.110 (Figure 1.14) (Due to their
massive size, these photographs became the subject of countless more photographs made by
visitors.) The subject matter skewed towards the banal: a family portrait, a tourist’s photo of the
Taj Mahal. Kodak’s implicit pitch to consumers was that with ever-simplifying technology (such
as the Instamatic), ordinary people could make something extraordinary (such as these billboardsized prints). In truth, there was nothing simple about Kodak’s display. The photos had been
taken by professionals with 8x10” view cameras.111 Technicians had then sliced each negative
into twelve strips, inserted them one at a time into a towering horizontal enlarger, and projected a
powerful light through them onto twelve corresponding, massive strips of photo-sensitive paper
which had been vacuum-sealed to a distant wall in Kodak’s enormous darkroom.112 (Figure 1.15)
Once developed, these strips were assembled back into a coherent picture on the exterior display
skeleton above the pavilion.113 Another complex vacuum system hidden inside the circular
display held the photographs in place, and massive banks of hidden lights illuminated them from
below.114 (Figure 1.16) The pavilion’s designers wanted the photographs to be visible at night, in
the shade, and in glare, so they used xenon gas-discharge lamps which emitted 30 million
108 Kodak At The Fair: Under The Picture Tower A World Of Adventure In The Kodak Pavilion (Rochester, NY:
Eastman Kodak Company, 1964), unpaginated.
109 “Reloading the Instamatic 126 Cartridge,” Kodak, accessed July 19, 2024,
https://kodak.3106.net/index.php?p=509.
110 Walter Carlson, “Kodak Provides Fair with Color,” New York Times, August 7, 1964, 14. 111 Bob Hering, “World’s Largest Color Prints,” Popular Science, May 1964, 160. 112 Ibid. 113 Carlson, 14. 114 Hering, 160.

22
lumens, making the photographs brighter than sunlight.115 The creation and display of these
photographs was exceptionally energy-intensive; the electric bill for the display lights alone was
$500 a day (or over $4,800 in 2023 dollars.)116 Twenty-three days after the fair closed, the
Northeast blackout cast the fairgrounds, and the wider region, into darkness, and left Burri
fumbling with film of unknown ISO.117
Chapter two examines photojournalist Bruce Davidson’s 1980 photographs of the New
York City subway. I rely on Davidson’s biography to paint a picture of a highly imaginative
artist who subtly reimagined the subjects of his early personal and editorial photography in
highly personal, often deeply melancholic terms. With his later subway series, however, I argue
that Davidson veered off the rails, as it were, illustrating the perils of New Photojournalism’s
highly subjective take on news events, by using flash and expressive color to reimagine the New
York City subway cars as if they were trains used by the Nazis to deport Jews to concentration
camps. To construct this argument, I lay out a series of reasons why this non-observing Jew
rediscovered Jewish identity, storytelling, and history at this particular moment. As a report on
the state of the subway, Davidson’s photographs diverge so sharply from mainstream media
depictions of this important civic news story that it forms something of a blackout within the
history of representations of mass transit. Davidson, the melancholic loner given to long, highly
personal documentary projects which sprung from ordinary news stories, seems to have gotten
lost on one of his many journeys inwards.
115 Ibid. 116 Hering, 160. “Inflation Calculator,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, accessed July 19, 2024,
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator. 117 Robert Alden, “Despite Controversies, Attendance Passes All Other Expositions,” New York Times, October 17,
1965, 1.

23
Chapter three examines Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of the gay cruising culture on the
abandoned piers lining the Hudson River taken in the 1970s and 1980s. I outline the history of
cruising in the city, the demise of New York’s shipping industry, and the appeal of these dark
and dangerous piers to gay men of the time. I examine the many, often commented-upon
examples of formal obfuscations in the work -- the ways Baltrop partially hid, cut up, and
distanced himself from his subjects, rendering them as tiny figures in massive, enclosed spaces.
Unlike other viewers, however, I argue that, at a time of intense scrutiny from police, white
artists such as William Friedkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, and members of the black
community, Baltrop’s photographs form an example of what postcolonial theorist Édouard
Glissant termed “opacity,” or the refusal to render oneself fully transparent to outsiders’ eyes.
Instead of accepting either complete invisibility or complete exposure as the gay person’s lot in
life, Baltrop documented pier culture bit by bit, and entirely on his own terms.
Chapter four examines Tod Papageorge’s photographs of Studio 54, made between 1978
and 1980. After having perused three examples of New York City documentary photography in
which the documentary impulse has either been stymied, redirected, or muffled, this chapter
draws the line at Papageorge’s radical notion that the photograph is completely divorced from
that which stood before the camera. I position Papageorge as inextricably bound to a network of
friends including photographer Garry Winogrand, whose own path from photojournalism to
advertising work left him disenchanted with the medium’s truth claims, and whose later artwork
made a tremendous impression on Papageorge, as well as MoMA curator John Szarkowski,
whose exhibitions attempted to undermine photography’s documentary claims. Several of those
exhibitions, as well as Papageorge’s own projects about Central Park and the disco, worked to
wrest photography away from social concerns. Papageorge’s loudly-shared belief that the

24
camera’s truth-telling power is nonexistent permitted his disco-era flights of fantasy into myth
and poetry.
Nighttime photography and Pictorialist photography form two precedents for the
photographers described in this dissertation. Paul Martin exhibited the first urban nocturnal
photographs, made along the Thames Embankment, at the 1896 Royal Photographic Society
Exhibition, and detailed his technique in The American Amateur Photographer later that year.118
(Figures 1.17-1.18) The outlandish nature of his pursuit was reflected in the comments of
passersby, one of whom suspected he was contemplating suicide by drowning, another of whom
took him to be a fisherman, and another of whom described him to a friend “in rather audible
tones, using a forcible expression, well known, but never seen in print.”119 William Fraser of the
Camera Club of New York repeated the experiment in Manhattan, and, like Martin, found that
“moving objects not bearing lights makes [sic] no impression on the plate.”120 (And, as with
Martin, he and his fellow pedestrians made vivid impressions on each other: “I have received a
great deal of advice and sympathy concerning my mental make-up and condition, he wrote.”)121
The April 1897 article in The Photographic Times announcing his work shows a variety of
darkened and unpeopled streetscapes made around midtown Manhattan, (Figure 1.19) but one
stands out. “The Savoy Hotel, Stormy Night” is a vertical composition showing the nowdemolished hotel, which once stood at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, partially obscured by the
118 Paul Martin, “London By Gaslight,” The American Amateur Photographer 8, no. 11 (November 1, 1896): 468. 119 Ibid. 120 William A. Fraser, “Night Photography,” The Photographic Times: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to
the Interests of Artistic and Scientific Photography 29, no. 4 (April 1897): 162. 121 Ibid.

25
bare trees of Grand Army Plaza and a haze of rain which makes the sidewalks glisten. (Figure
1.20)
This amount of veiling was inadequate to the Pictorialist photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
By using longer exposures, Stieglitz embraced the halation (the soft glow bleeding out of light
sources in many nighttime photographs) that both Martin and Fraser sought to avoid, arguing
that it provided a “more sincere and picturesque rendering of the object itself.”122 His 1898
photograph of the Savoy Hotel, where he and his wife were living, was taken from the same
angle as Fraser’s, but from a closer distance, in a horizontal orientation, with haloed lights, and --
most importantly, for the first time we know of -- a human figure legible despite the darkness.123
(Figure 1.21) Coincidentally, Fraser and Stieglitz were standing just steps from where René
Burri would later be working when the 1965 blackout occurred.
Veiling was a key attribute of Pictorialist work, informed both by the physiology of
human vision and the aesthetic choices behind Whistler’s nocturnes. Photographers achieved this
by seeking out dim light and atmospheric effects, and rendering scenes with deliberate over- or
underexposure, soft-focus lenses, and low-contrast platinum printing.124 (By approaching the
misty style of Whistler’s painted nocturnes, these methods also helped veil the photographs’
status as photographs.) In its New York City instantiation, this veiling produced the paradox of a
calm, pastoral vision of an often ugly, hyper-urban environment.125 The most famous nocturnal
Pictorialist photograph is Steichen’s “The Flatiron--Evening” from 1904. (Figure 1.22) A darkly
elegant vision of the city sunken in blue and green tones, the photograph captures the Flatiron
122 Ibid. Alfred Stieglitz, “Night Photography with the Introduction of Life,” in Stieglitz on Photography: His
Selected Essays and Notes, ed. Richard Whelan (New York: Aperture, 2000), 83. 123 By reducing the exposure time to less than a minute, Stieglitz was able to capture a driver sitting in a horse-drawn
carriage waiting outside the hotel. Stieglitz, 86.
124 Hélène Valance, Nocturne: Night in American Art, 1890-1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 58, 61. 125 Max Kozloff, “New York: Capital of Photography,” in New York: Capital of Photography, ed. Max Kozloff
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 12.

26
Building rising from the wet city streets into the sky, while a cab driver in a top hat waits in the
shadows for a fare, and delicate tree branches spread across the surface of the image like cracks
in ice. William Chapman Sharpe argues that Steichen “ruralizes” the urban scene through his
inclusion of the protruding tree branches, thereby softening “the rude force of capitalism.”126
(Multiple scholars have argued something to this effect; Hollis Clayson also argues that John
Singer Sargent “pastoralizes” the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1879 by tricking the viewer into
seeing the garish effects of newly installed artificial lighting as simple moonlight.127) (Figure
1.23) Such cosmetic adjustments did not sit well with all viewers. In Peter Conrad’s later
cantankerous reading, Pictorialist photography of New York City represented a “mis-seeing” and
“smudging of sight.”128 The images were a “fabulated” and “fictionalizing” version of the city
“mistily wavering into fantasy.”129
Not only did Pictorialists veil their subject matter and their photographs’ very status as
photography, but they also worked to prevent their work from even being seen -- via
reproduction in the supposedly vulgar mass media -- at all. As Hélène Valance argues,
Pictorialism’s “dark tones, restricted palettes, and blurred outlines remained in great part
inaccessible to the technologies of the time, despite the advances made.”130 Too delicate to
travel, as it were, the work remained stubbornly hidden in the private galleries of the privileged.
Photographic veiling such as this forms the cornerstone of this dissertation.
126 Sharpe, 123. 127 Hollis Clayson, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 2019), 49.
128 Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),
74.
129 Ibid. 130 Valance, 56.

27
New York’s Darkest Days
The four sites considered in this dissertation are not only all forms of broken
infrastructure, but they are also all optically dark spaces, and as the rest of this introduction will
demonstrate, they were set against a backdrop of both literal and figurative darkness. New York
was the hardest-hit city of those affected by the November 9, 1965 electrical blackout, which
was at the time the largest electrical blackout in world history, as measured by the number of
people affected.131 And it was the hardest-hit city of those affected by the 1977 blackout, which
was at the time the second-largest blackout.132 The city had certainly lost power and light before
the time period in question, albeit with fairly harmless consequences. In fact, it was the site of
perhaps the first ever blackout of any kind in US history in 1848 when an enormous fire
destroyed the gas lighting company headquarters.133 The New York Herald turned yellow in the
dark, proclaiming, “the calamity will doubtless be hailed with joy by those who prowl about the
city to rob their fellow men; for never before has such an opportunity to practice their villainy
been afforded them.”134 (A day later, the editors had to admit no such thing had happened.)135 In
131 “The Ten Worst Blackouts of the Last Fifty Years,” 2. 132 New York City was also the site of the world’s first commercial power plant, created by Thomas Edison and
located at 255-257 Pearl Street in the financial district of Manhattan. Everett Britt, Mark Strain, and Casey Wren, “A
Century Plus of Power and Light,” Infrastructure 57, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 1. “The Ten Worst Blackouts of the Last
Fifty Years,” 2.
133 Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015): 28. The first concerted attempt at lighting the New York night came in the 1770s, when the
city installed a series of dim oil lamps at wide intervals on certain streets. Too weak to illuminate the street, they
functioned instead as navigation beacons amidst the inky blackness. Since each lamp was a self-contained unit, there
was little risk of a system-wide outage. Peter C. Baldwin, “In The Heart Of Darkness: Blackouts and the Social
Geography of Lighting in the Gaslight Era,” Journal Of Urban History 30, no. 5 (July 2004): 751. By 1828, the
commercial district of southern Broadway had installed gas lighting, connected at considerable expense to a
centralized gas source, while poorer areas remained in the dark. Even as gas became cheaper and more prevalent, the
inequities of illumination remained. In the event of a widespread supply disruption, buildings at higher elevation,
typically more prosperous, were able to stay illuminated for hours longer, due to the fact that unburned gas still in
the pipes would rise in altitude. (Ibid 754) In autumn of 1882, Thomas Edison opened the first commercial central
power plant in the world at 255-257 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan. The plant ran on coal and could illuminate up
to 1,400 incandescent bulbs. Everett Britt, Mark Strain, and Casey Wren, “A Century Plus of Power and Light,”
Infrastructure 57, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 1. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid.

28
1863, participants in the Draft Riot destroyed a small gas factory on 42nd Street near the
Hudson.136 A decade later, workers at a gas plant supplying Lower Manhattan -- the heart of the
city back then -- went on strike, darkening the neighborhood and frightening people off the
streets.137 Parts of New York lost power after a blizzard in 1888, a dynamo explosion in 1907, a
generator failure in 1936, and the hurricane of 1938.138 (Figure 1.24) World War II induced fear
of bombing raids in urban dwellers across the Western world, and New York voluntarily blacked
out at night in March of 1942.139 (Figure 1.25) The city experienced minor accidental localized
blackouts in 1959 and 1961.140 Yet these blackouts -- especially the earlier ones -- were not as
consequential as those to come, in part because the electrical grid was not yet fully woven
together. The 1936 failure, for example, affected the northern half of Manhattan, the Bronx, and
much of Westchester County -- but completely spared Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.141
They were also not as consequential simply because people did not use much electricity as they
would in years to come. In a typical office in the year 1950, for example, typewriters and adding
machines were mechanical, and documents were copied with carbon paper; electricity was
mainly used for light and ventilation.142
But then, the city, once admired for its glowing icons of modernity – skyscrapers,
bridges, and billboards – began to suffer repeated, sometimes massive power failures. In 1965, a
136 Ibid 30. 137 Ibid 32. 138 Baldwin, 750. 139 Britain’s government ordered London to go dark the very evening of the Nazi invasion of Poland, September 1,
1939. The rules were the most stringent during the first two months, during which time civilians blacked out their
windows, shopkeepers restricted their hours, and workers at blast furnaces masked the glow of their labor.
Streetlights were shut off almost entirely for the duration of the war, resulting in confusion, injury, and death. In the
first four months of the blackout, there were twice the number of pedestrian fatalities as during the same months of
1938. David Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2010), 58.
Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 215-219. 140 Ibid 68. 141 Nye, 71. 142 Nye, 72.

29
gigantic blackout cut power to 30 million people across the northeast US and southeast
Canada.143 In July 1970, eight hundred families in the Mill Basin and Bergen Beach areas of
Brooklyn lost power.144 September 23, 1970 found the city on the brink of a massive power
outage; Harlem Hospital was pitch black and swelteringly hot inside, while the Empire State
Building and several bridges went dark.145 The February 8, 1971 issue of the New York Times
announced that the city “appears fated to operate on the edge of electric power failures for at
least the next three months” due to Consolidated Edison’s generators being under repair.146
(Figure 1.26) In December of 1974, under threat of bankruptcy, struggling to modernize its
antiquated grid, and widely despised by the nine million people who relied on it, ConEd shut off
heat and most lighting in its own headquarters as it tried to set an example of energy
conservation for the rest of the city.147 In the midst of a punishing heatwave in July of 1977,
another enormous blackout threw the city into chaos.
“New York City in Crisis”
New York also entered a period of figurative darkness and decline in the mid-1960s.
Given journalism’s postwar turn toward interpretation and interrogation described above,
perhaps it would be appropriate to examine this period through an important series the New York
Herald Tribune began on January 25, 1965 entitled “New York City in Crisis.” The Tribune was
known as a “writer’s paper,” in which individual voices -- including New Journalists such as
Tom Wolfe -- were able to work outside the bounds of objectivity practiced in top-down
143 This will be covered extensively in chapter one. 144 Peter Kihss, “High City Demand For Power Met By Voltage Cuts,” New York Times, July 28, 1970, 1. 145 Homer Bigart, “Power Rationed As Hot Weather Continues In East,” New York Times, September 24, 1970, 1. 146 Peter Kihss, “City Faces Power Crises For at Least 3 Months,” New York Times, February 8, 1971, 42. 147 A. H. Raskin, “A View From Con Ed's Dim Executive Suite,” New York Times, December 8, 1974, 256.

30
“editors’ papers” such as the New York Times.
148 The management of the moderately Republican
Tribune had been planning a way to oust three-term Democratic Mayor Wagner since 1963, and
they decided to do an in-depth investigative series on the many problems festering in the city,
and explicitly pin them on the mayor.149 Each installment was accompanied by a panoramic
aerial photograph of Manhattan, its buildings cast into gloomy silhouette, as if the city had
simply shut down in exhaustion. (Figure 1.27) The first piece in the series presented an overview
of the city’s ailments, including terrible traffic, the decline in manufacturing jobs, the “cramped,
inadequately heated, insanitary, rat-infested apartments,” and the “the killing effects ghetto life
and isolation have on the mind as well as the body.”150 Well-intentioned city workers were
stymied by a thicket of bureaucracy; one letter proposed the (at the time radical) idea of using
“an IBM machine to figure out some chain of command.”151 Somewhere in that maze,
supposedly, was Mayor Wagner, a man the writer described as “almost totally incapable or
unwilling to make forceful or meaningful decisions.”152 The paper was deluged with letters from
readers, many of them commending the paper for speaking up. Editors ran a selection of letters
which supported their position in a later issue. A woman named Sheila Makris described the city
as “a grab bag for unscrupulous politicians and organized crime,” while Byron Deal said it was
“the worst of all places…plain ugly--inside and out.”153 A letter signed “S.A.” lamented the lack
of playgrounds for children, who are instead “chased from street to street till they get mean and
148 Raymond McCaffrey, “Barry H. Gottehrer and a ‘City in Crisis’: The Path from Journalist to Peacekeeper in New
York City's Turbulent Streets in the 1960s.” Journalism History 44, no. 3 (2018): 164. 149 Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (New York: Knopf, 1986), 699. 150 Barry Gottehrer, Barrett McGurn, Marshall Peck, and Claude Lewis, “New York, Greatest City in the World --
And Everything Is Wrong With It,” New York Herald Tribune, January 25, 1965, 1. 151 Ibid 6. 152 Ibid. 153 Barry Gottehrer, Barrett McGurn, Marshall Peck, and Claude Lewis, “Shocking Crime Rise In Subways,” New
York Herald Tribune, February 10, 1965, 10.

31
destructive.”154 Marian Berri hoped, simply, that the newspaper would “succeed in obtaining the
Mayor’s scalp.”155 When the paper was not savaging Wagner, it was respectfully quoting its
favorite candidate in the upcoming election, the moderate Republican congressman John
Lindsay, who would later say the series had “provided a raison d’être for [him] to run.”156 Less
than five months after the series began, Wagner, his poll numbers cratering, tearfully announced
he would not seek reelection.157 On November 2, Lindsay beat Abe Beame for the position.158 By
shifting its editorial stance towards interpretation, the Herald Tribune gained new visibility as a
powerful force in the downfall of a mayor -- and also uncovered problems which would haunt
the city for years.
Meanwhile, the South Bronx was sliding into catastrophe. In 1962, Robert Moses’ Cross
Bronx Expressway had cut the South Bronx in half and laid waste to every neighborhood in its
way. Two years before that road came in, the Bronx reported under a thousand assaults; seven
years after, the number had reached four thousand. In this same period, burglaries jumped from
under two thousand to over twenty-nine thousand.159 In 1973, New York Times journalist Martin
Tolchin compared the South Bronx to “Dresden after the war,” “a jungle stalked by fear, seized
by rage,” “a foreign country where fear is the overriding emotion in a landscape of despair,” and
a place that is “violent, drugged, burned out, graffiti splattered and abandoned.”160 (Figure 1.28)
154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 McCaffrey, 165. 157 Ibid. 158 As the election results came in, a Tribune editor shouted to the newsroom, “We did it!” Barry Gottehrer, who led
the team which wrote the series, left journalism, becoming a top aide in Lindsay’s administration. Ibid. Kluger, 703.
McCaffrey, 163.
159 Randol Contreras, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013.
160 Themis Chronopoulos, “The Rebuilding of the South Bronx after the Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Urban History 43,
no. 6 (2017): 932.

32
The population decreased at an extraordinary rate, from 760,000 to 450,000.161 Between 1970
and 1981, the Bronx lost more than 108,000 dwelling units, or one-fifth of its entire housing
stock, to abandonment, demolition, or arson.162
City government hemorrhaged money. In 1975 alone, New York, which was only second
to Washington, DC in its proportion of public employees, paid $973 million into its municipal
pension fund (over $5.5 billion in 2024 dollars.)163 Out of a population of 7.5 million people, 1.1
million, or 15%, received welfare from the federal government, and the city had to pay for
additional services for this group of New Yorkers as well.164 City officials tried to incentivize
large businesses to stay put when so many wanted to escape to cheaper, safer locations.165 So
they took out massive and costly loans to help businesses get mortgages for what would become
the largest office tower bubble in the city’s history.166 (Out of the 66 million square feet of new
office space, most of it in Lower Manhattan, 10 million were in the new World Trade Center
alone.167 With such a glut of development, the WTC took 28 years to achieve full occupancy,
which occurred shortly before it was destroyed in the September 11th attacks.168) With very few
people interested in buying or renting any of this new space, business interests lobbied the city to
161 Peter L'Official, Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2020): 25.
162 Ibid 75. 163 Jason Epstein, “The Last Days of New York,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/the-last-days-of-new-york. “Inflation Calculator,” Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis, accessed July 23, 2024, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflationcalculator.
164 Jason Epstein, “The Last Days of New York,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/the-last-days-of-new-york. Edward C. Burks, “New York City's
Population Loss 442,000 Since 1970, Is Slackening,” New York Times, September 5, 1977,
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/05/archives/new-jersey-pages-new-york-citys-population-loss-442000-since1970.html#:~:text=As%20of%20July%201%2C%201976,a%20loss%20of%205.6%20percent.
165 Greenberg, 125. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid. 168 Martin Filler, “Supersize That?” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2024,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/05/23/supersize-that-supertall-billionaires-row.

33
spend yet more money to rent the space for government agencies, and to define 40% of all real
estate in the city tax-exempt.169 With too much money flowing out and not enough flowing in,
banks predicted the city would default on its debt.170 They sold off all their New York City bonds
in early 1975 and refused to market the city’s debt, leaving it unable to borrow.171 In June of that
year, $792 million worth of securities were about to mature, but the city did not have the money
to cover them; it was effectively bankrupt.172
New York was fast losing its white population. Between 1970 and 1975 alone, 600,000
whites moved, often to the suburbs or to warmer climes.173 Internal migrants from Puerto Rico
had been taking cheap flights on the guagua aérea to the city since the end of World War II,
lured by tales of a booming economy and pushed out by development policies which produced
better jobs for some and (even) worse jobs for others.174 Pushed out of agricultural production by
increasing mechanization, and seeking better work, a massive wave of African-Americans
moved from the rural south to the urban north between 1945 and the late 1960s.175 In the first
half of the 1970s, the Bronx became the first borough in New York history to be “majority
169 Greenberg, 125. Jason Epstein, “The Last Days of New York,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/the-last-days-of-new-york. 170 Greenberg, 125. 171 Jeff Nussbaum, “The Night New York Saved Itself from Bankruptcy,” New Yorker, October 16, 2015,
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy. 172 Greenberg, 126. 173 The 1975 Census Bureau survey used the following categories: white non-Puerto Rican, Negro non‐Puerto Rican,
Puerto Rican, and “other races.” Charles Kaiser, “Blacks and Puerto Ricans a Bronx Majority,” New York Times,
April 19, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/19/archives/blacks-and-puerto-ricans-a-bronx-majority-studyfinds-blacks-and.html. 174 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 164-166. 175 Upon arriving in the north, it became clear to many internal migrants that the manufacturing jobs they had sought
had already moved to cheaper labor markets, sometimes in the very places from which they had come. Jason
Epstein, “The Last Days of New York,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/the-last-days-of-new-york. Kenneth K. Kusmer, “African Americans
in the City Since World War II,” in The New African American Urban History, ed. Kenneth W. Goings and
Raymond A. Mohl (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 323.

34
minority.”176 In 1960, the city was 78% white, 13% black, and 8% Puerto Rican. Fifteen years
later it was 62% white, 22% black, and 12% Puerto Rican.177 The city was, demographically
speaking, darkening at a fast rate.
Panic struck when, in early 1977, news spread of a serial killer on the prowl, armed with
a hunting rifle and targeting lone women and courting couples. (Figure 1.29) Nightclubs and
restaurants emptied out as New Yorkers refused to go out at night. The murderer left a note for
police at one crime scene, in which he called himself “Son of Sam,” and declared that he was
following the orders of demons, as communicated by a neighbor’s dog. The murders kept
happening throughout the summer, prompting the creation of a squad of 200 detectives and
hundreds of other police officers, until the killer, a young postal worker named David Berkowitz,
was caught on August 10th.178 (Figure 1.30)
Even if other cities in the US also experienced deindustrialization, fiscal crisis, crime,
urban blight, white flight, and massive power outages, these problems were much more widely
publicized by New York’s extraordinarily robust media industry -- the newspapers, magazines,
and television news stations for whom the five boroughs constituted a backyard. Miriam
Greenberg examines the city as a public relations battlefield, in which the 1964/65 World’s Fair,
the Association for a Better New York, the Bicentennial celebration, and the “I❤NY” campaign
each tried in different ways to overcome the city’s near-constant stream of bad news.179
Ironically, it was the Lindsay administration’s masterful streamlining of the city’s film
176 Charles Kaiser, “Blacks and Puerto Ricans a Bronx Majority,” New York Times, April 19, 1976,
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/19/archives/blacks-and-puerto-ricans-a-bronx-majority-study-finds-blacksand.html.
177 Ibid. 178 Ibid 184. 179 See Greenberg.

35
permitting process which helped lead to an explosion of excellent -- and very grim -- cinematic
depictions of the city.180
Not only were there more negative images created of New York, but those images also
had greater concrete consequences, given the city’s preeminent size and economic importance.
City officials were outraged in 1971 at the major credit-rating agencies for not having upgraded
the city’s bond rating from “high risk” even once during the preceding five years, a move which
resulted in the city paying enormous interest rates to borrow money. The Vice President of
Standard & Poor’s defended the decision bluntly, blaming the enormous volume of bonds the
city had to sell -- and “the bad publicity the city continually receives because of crime, strikes,
welfare, etc.”181 Elsewhere, urban sociologist William H. Whyte noted that across TV
documentaries, magazines, and PR campaigns, New York City was portrayed as “hell on earth,”
represented by telephoto shots of congested streets, dreary offices, and grim-faced white
businessmen in overcrowded, racially diverse subway cars. Meanwhile, suburban office parks
were depicted in these same media outlets as a modern “Arcadia,” replete with clean, modernist
architecture, lush lawns, and cheerful white employees who commuted in the comfort of their
own cars. Bad press was one significant factor in the exodus of big business from the city. In
1960, New York was home to 140 of the 500 largest corporations in the country.182 By 1975, 44
of them had left, and 30 million square feet of office space was left unrented in Manhattan
alone.183 Economist Wolfgang Quante argued in 1976 that such a “weakening of the City’s
business image … strikes directly at the heart of its existence.”184 It is no wonder that multiple
180 McCaffrey, 165. 181 Greenberg, 98. 182 Jason Epstein, “The Last Days of New York,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/the-last-days-of-new-york. 183 Ibid. 184 Wolfgang Quante, The Exodus of Corporate Headquarters from New York City (New York:
Praeger, 1976), 76-77.

36
letters to the editor of the New York Times -- and even that indefatigable booster of the city,
Mayor Ed Koch -- described the 1970s as New York’s “darkest hour.”185 “Watchman, tell us of
the night, what its signs of promise are,” William J. Dean implored in an article in the Times on
New Year’s Eve 1970, to which he imagined the response: “few signs of promise, the night fills
us with foreboding.”186
Methodology
Even as the dissertation plumbs issues covered elsewhere by historians of the press and of
the city of New York, it pays particularly close attention to photographs. I draw upon resources
developed within the field of art history in the belief that photographs are not only acted upon --
by light and by large historical forces -- but are also powerful historical forces in their own right,
and therefore worthy of our scrutiny. Close reading of images, combined with attention to
biography, form the core of my method. Biographical interpretation of art fell out of favor with
the New Criticism movement, whose members chose to focus on internal characteristics of a text
at the expense of the author’s intentions, social context, or reception.187 The poststructuralist
attack on the very notion of a stable, unified human subject with an internal essence independent
of structure seemed to render biographical interpretation null and void.188 The social history of
art emphasized context over individual. Yet in the intervening years, various scholars have risen
to the defense of this method, such as when Stanley Fish wrote that to attempt to “divorce” the
185 Thomas E. Norton, “Letters to the Editor,” New York Times, October 25, 1975, 28. Samuel Nadel, “Letters to the
Editor,” New York Times, June 11, 1976, 21. Frank Lynn, “Koch Joins the Mayoral Contest; Questions Beame's
Competence,” New York Times, March 5, 1977, 1. 186 William J. Dean, “Watchman, What of The Night?” New York Times, December 31, 1970, 18. 187 Karen Junod, Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760-1810 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
188 Keith Moxey, “The History of Art after the Death of the ‘Death of the Subject,’” In[ ]visible Culture, 1999,
https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/moxey/moxey.html.

37
writer from their work is not only “inadvisable” but altogether “impossible.”189 This dissertation
is built not on a grand unifying theory in search of photographs and photographers with which to
illustrate it. Rather, it begins locally, with the photographers, their photographs, the ideas and
images which were available to them at their moment in history, as well as with their experiences
and knowledge and the way these interacted with public discourse of the time.
Conclusion
The four photographers in this dissertation, beginning with René Burri, point to another
chapter in the history of representation of New York in the dark, one which combines the
iconography of literal nighttime with hints of a figurative, epistemological darkness. In distinct
ways, these photographers demonstrate a break between photography and knowledge. Burri,
accustomed to using his telephoto lens to look into deep space, found his perception of the x,y,z
coordinates of New York City’s epic peaks and canyons suddenly flattened by the darkness. At
the very same time, he realized he did not know the sensitivity of the film he had shoved into his
pockets when the lights went out. His photographs of that night -- the ones which are legible --
register a profound unease. Davidson used a common news story, crime in the subway, as a point
of departure to a nightmarish otherworld colored by his own disposition and darkened by his
recent interactions with Holocaust-themed novels and survivors. Baltrop spent years obsessively
documenting gay cruising on the abandoned Hudson River piers, yet many of the photographs
seem to hide as much as they reveal, using formal strategies of obfuscation to describe his
community on his own terms. Finally, Tod Papageorge, dismissive of any truth claims in
189 Stanley Fish, “Biography and Intention,” in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and
Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Epstein (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University
Press, 1991), 10.

38
photography whatsoever, uses the people in front of his lens like puppets to illustrate
mythological stories, and as raw material for his exercises in elaborate composition.
As New York’s circuits of electricity, transportation, and entertainment broke down, they
became newly visible. It was not apparent just to New Yorkers but, through the city’s massive
media presence, it became clear to increasingly dismayed viewers around the world. Yet at the
very same time, media and in particular photography underwent their greatest crisis of the
century, receiving criticism from the Left and the Right, from those in the US and abroad, from
both politicians and academics. Photography’s truth claims, which had been broadly accepted
since the late 19th century, were rendered suspicious. The medium’s circuit of information
seemed to be broken. The photographers examined in this dissertation pictured the city’s blocked
circuits with images that were also blocked, full of omissions and uncertainties. Just as the city
experienced dramatic blackouts, so did these photographers.

39
CHAPTER 1
René Burri’s Camera Vision and the 1965 Blackout
On the evening of November 9, 1965, Swiss photojournalist René Burri (1933-2014) was
in his colleague Elliott Erwitt’s studio, nestled between the Plaza Hotel and the Paris Theater in
midtown Manhattan.190 Erwitt’s exhibition “Improbable Photographs” at the nearby Museum of
Modern Art had just closed the previous month, and the two were reviewing motion picture
footage Burri had recently shot in China, as one of the very few Westerner photojournalists
allowed in at the time.191 The scene of shadow boxers in action slowed to a flicker, before
dimming out completely, along with power for 30 million people across the northeastern US and
Canada.192 Burri managed to shove eight unexposed rolls of 35mm film in his pockets and exit
the building.193 A master of the telephoto, Burri had used this lens’ uncanny effect of optical
compression to see into the far reaches of a given scene and bind foreground and background
into elaborate architectural constructions. (Figure 2.1) But that night, taking pictures and
stumbling in the dark up and down Fifth Avenue between 59th and 42nd Streets, he was stymied
by a camera he could no longer control and by night vision which robbed him of his sense of
spatial depth.194 For an accomplished photojournalist, who by the age of twenty-seven had
190 René Burri and Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri - Blackout New York: 9 November 1965 (München: Moser,
2009), unpaginated. The studio has since been demolished. Ellen Erwitt, text message to author, June 19, 2024.
191 “Elliott Erwitt: Improbable Photographs,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed June 19, 2024,
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3469? Burri helped create the film division of Magnum Photos and
spent six months in China making the film “The Two Faces of China” for the BBC. See “René Burri,” Magnum
Photos, accessed January 4, 2023. https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/rene-burri 192 Burri and Koetzle, unpaginated. 193 Ibid. 194 I am relying on monographs of Burri’s work, as well as Magnum Photo’s digitized archive. Burri has an
extensive archive at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, but the only items related to the blackout work are 33
prints, one magazine article about the book from 2009, three layouts for the book, and a letter from fellow Magnum
photographer Marc Riboud in which he briefly congratulated Burri for having made the work: “Bravo for the photos
of the Blackout. Bravo first for having photographed that! And bravo for having photographed very well! (and it was
not a very well lit subject!...)” Marc Riboud to René Burri, November 15 [no year]. Burri and Koetzle, unpaginated.

40
already been sent around the world from Czechoslovakia to Iran to Bolivia in order to document
news events for prestigious publications, the layers of uncertainty encountered during that long
night formed an unprecedented obstacle, and the resulting photographs register a deep and
anxious unknowing, an unknowing which Burri worried might appear untoward in a
photojournalist’s work.195 As Hans-Michael Koetzle noted about the author, “Burri kept the
series in a little box, separated from the rest of his work…he was afraid his colleagues at
Magnum would consider it ‘art.’ Magnum still was on the more or less strict journalistic path.”196
Hans Finsler
Confusion and surprise were near-universal the night of the blackout; every sighted
person in the affected region had to navigate the flattening effects of imperfect night vision. But
Burri’s case is interesting because his photographic practice was so deeply architectural -- so set
on constructing enclosures by harnessing the special effects of a telephoto lens -- and yet this
mode became impossible in the dark. Burri’s journey towards architecture begins with Hans
Finsler (1891-1972), a prominent practitioner of New Objectivity photography, as well as René
Burri’s future instructor. (Figure 2.2) I argue that his architecture photography practice inspired
Burri’s interest in architecture as both iconography and photographic structure.
Although he is often written about as a photographer of austere, unpeopled still-lifes,
Finsler had another side which would prove critical to Burri’s future. Trained as an architect and
later as an art historian (by the seminal Heinrich Wölfflin, no less) Finsler took a job at Burg
Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany which involved library work and
195 Koetzle, “Introduction,” 26. 196 Koetzle knew Burri, wrote about him extensively, and curated an exhibition of his work. Email to the author,
January 26, 2023.

41
lecturing to students. Finsler insisted on using high quality slides in his lectures. Yet previous
photographers had documented the students’ artistic output using “arty” techniques such as soft
focus and velvety backdrops. If Finsler was going to teach from these images, he thought he
would need to learn photography and shoot them the way he wanted -- straight.197 Within a few
short years, Finsler became a respected photographer in his own right, and exhibited in the room
László Moholy-Nagy organized for the seminal 1929 exhibition Film und Foto (Film and Photo.)
(Figure 2.3) Most of Finsler’s well-known stillifes resulted from commercial assignments, which
he used to supplement his teaching income in the 1930s and 40s. These include elegant
photographs of consumer objects such as porcelain (Figure 2.4), furniture (Figure 2.5), and light
bulbs. (Figure 2.6) Finsler also foregrounded the human labor behind the commodities he was
assigned to promote, whether in photographic instruction cards illustrating sewing technique,
(Figure 2.8) or of photographs of workers shouldering heavy rolls of paper, (Figure 2.9) or
producing textiles, (Figure 2.10).198
Just as it is incorrect to assume Finsler ignored the human in favor of the material, it is
also incorrect to assume that the only material he photographed was consumer goods. Finsler
pursued architectural photography from early on in his career in Halle, Germany, including
multiple studies of the Roter Turm (Red Tower, a clocktower dominating the Marktplatz in the
197 Interestingly, Finsler was not the only canonical Neue Sachlichkeit photographer who began their career making
straight, even anonymous, didactic documents. Pepper Stetler argues convincingly that Albert Renger-Patzsch’s
artistic oeuvre developed out of his earlier commissions photographing artworks for a mass-market publication.
Annette Tietenberg, “Der geleitete Blick,” Form 193-194 (January/February 2004): 79. See Pepper Stetler, “The
Object, the Archive and the Origins of Neue Sachlichkeit Photography.” History of Photography 35, no.3 (2011):
281-295. 198 Admittedly, Finsler did lend a stillife to a 1933 article by Richard L.F. Schulz in Die Form with the
unintentionally comical title “Der Kampf der elektrischen Glühlampe um ihre formale Selbständigkeit,” (The
struggle of the electric light bulb for its formal independence.) Such anthropomorphizing of commodities is a clear
example of what Georg Lukács called “reification.”

42
center of town) (Figures 2.11-2.12) and of the Giebichenstein Bridge.199 (Figures 2.13-2.14) He
later photographed Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s Immeuble Clarté, a prefabricated luxury
apartment building in Geneva.200 (Figures 2.15-2.16) Indeed, between 1932 and 1939 he took
1,200 photos of buildings, with a client list that included Zürich’s best architects.201 Finsler even
photographed architectural lighting, during the October 1932 Zürich Light Week festival.202
(Figures 2.17-2.18)
Finsler’s interest in architecture touched his pedagogical mission and his professional
self-image. During the course of his negotiations when joining the Zürich School of Applied
Arts, Finsler wrote that he would welcome “future professional photographers and possibly
commercial artists, but also art historians, [and] architects…” as his students.203 He insisted on
having a balanced career, by having “the opportunity to do his own work,” in addition to his
official duties, which he felt was “necessary for further development, like the architect or
199 Bruno Maurer & Daniel Weiss, “Architectural Photography As Object Photography: Hans Finsler And The
Modern Swiss Architecture,” in Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung,
1932-1960, ed. Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser (Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006), 104. 200 Ibid 106. 201 Ibid. 202 Sponsored by the city, the electric company, and the Museum of Applied Arts, the festival brought together wellknown architects and designers to explore the potential of electric lighting in a Swiss context. Electric lighting had
first arrived in Zürich in 1892 in the Quaianlagen area along the banks of the lake, and by the late 1920s, cinemas,
department stores, and historic landmarks lit up the night sky. The change to the city was not without its critics, and
in 1928 the Commission for the Aesthetic Appraisal of Advertisements began regulating outdoor commercial
lighting. Light Week was clearly an attempt to charm and disarm naysayers. The outdoor displays included
temporary floodlights on important buildings, an elegant glowing grille on the facade of the Jelmoli department
store, modern traffic lights, floating light fountains on the lake, and a competition for illuminated advertisements. At
the same time, the Museum of Applied Arts hosted an exhibition called “Light in the Home, Office, and Workshop,”
for indoor illumination. Concern grew in the 19th century that the glare from newly installed gas and electric lights
might harm the human eye as well as cause traffic accidents. (We will see how, decades later, René Burri struggled
with the same problem.) Government officials repeatedly set aside municipal spaces so that lighting companies
could demonstrate their inventions to a skeptical public, and sites like Schloßplatz soon featured a wild array of
competing lamps. An important step towards a comprehensive standardization and regulation of lighting came in
1912 when the Deutsche Beleuchtungstechnische Gesellschaft (German Society for Lighting Technology) was
founded and began issuing guidelines. By 1935, it had established criteria for street lighting for the entirety of the
country. In 1955, new standards including glare limitations and optical systems for light control took effect in what
by then was West Germany. Maurer and Weiss, 116. Ute Hasenöhrl, “Lighting Conflicts From a Historical
Perspective,” in Urban Lighting, Light Pollution, and Society, ed. Josiane Meier, Ute Hasenöhrl, Katharina Krause,
Merle Pottharst (New York: Routledge, 2015), 107, 109.
203 Ibid 104.

43
painter.”204 Burri’s teacher, while best known for his unadorned stillife photography, was in fact
trained as an architect and had a robust architectural photography practice. This element of his
career would have a profound impact on his future pupil.
Burri’s Early Years
As a teenager, Burri enrolled at the well-known Zürich School of Arts and Crafts, and
after taking Johannes Itten’s famously idiosyncratic foundations class, began the three-year
photography program under Finsler in early 1950.205 For one classroom exercise, Finsler taught
Burri how to use a Leica camera and sent him out to photograph. Upon returning, the teacher and
pupil developed, fixed, and rinsed the film, pulled it off the reel, held it up to the light -- and
found it was blank.206 “Very interesting, René!” Finsler remarked acidly of the negatives, which
if printed, would have produced uniformly black photographs. “His comment was like a slap in
the face,” Burri recalled. “I thought it was all over then and there.”207 The anxiety of not
knowing what, if anything, was being recorded on his film would return to Burri years later
during the blackout, although under vastly different circumstances.
Burri left very little evidence of interest in stillife photography from his time at school
and found himself chafing against Finsler’s emphasis on strict formal and technical precision. He
did credit his professor with teaching him “the architectonic element in photography,” although
he did not explain what he meant by that.208 Instead, Burri seems to have gravitated towards
204 Maurer and Weiss, 110. 205 Ibid 15. Itten (1888-1967) was a Swiss painter, color theorist, writer, and teacher whose mystical beliefs and
unusual pedagogical style -- leading the students in gymnastics, humming, and in one case, roaring like a lion -- led
to a schism with the more practically minded Bauhaus. Elements of Itten’s introduction to design course remain
essential in most art programs to this day. See Henry P. Raleigh, “Johannes Itten and the Background of Modern Art
Education.” Art Journal 27, no. 3, (Spring 1968): 284-287 & 302. 206 Koetzle, 16. 207 Ibid. 208 Koetzle, 17.

44
photographs of the built environment. Art historians Thilo Koenig and Martin Gasser believe two
photographs showing his classmates taking pictures of ornate Venetian Gothic architecture on a
class trip may have been made by him.209 (Figure 2.19) Also important to Burri’s future career as
a photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos, Finsler introduced the class to the work of an
alumnus of the photography program, Werner Bischof, who had been establishing an
international reputation as a photojournalist.210
As part of his 1953 diploma thesis at art school, Burri took a photograph of Kindergarten
Riedenhalden, just north of Zürich. (Figure 2.20) Made at a time when he was squirming under
Finsler’s thumb, eager to break free, the photograph’s themes pivot around boundedness and
freedom, and constitute an early example of Burri’s figuratively “architectural” photography.
The photographer is standing inside by a window, looking out. At the bottom left-hand side of
the frame, sitting at the window but absorbed in his task, is a boy playing with what appears to
be a doll house. Outside, two children play with rolling hoops, while a crowd of other children
dart about on what appears to be a natural playground of unfinished stones. Beyond them is a
row of saplings planted with stakes and further still is a rolling, grassy hill.
The photograph is “architectural” for more reasons than the simple fact that it was made
inside a building. Its themes pivot around enclosure versus escape, boundedness versus flight.
The boy at bottom left is alone and inside, cut off from the hive of activity outside the window.
He is conjuring a tiny fantasy world inside his half-enclosed playhouse, while his classmates
scatter and converge, look about, run away, skip rope, get scolded, and do it all over again. One
boy with a hoop seems to be estimating his necessary exit velocity, while his confederate at far
209 See Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-1960, edited by
Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser. Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.
210 “René Burri,” Camera, July 1956, 324.

45
right is already rocketing out of view. The row of trees, planted for shade and screening, seem to
be about as effective a bounding tool for these scallywags as the windowpanes -- coincidentally
the exact ratio of a 35mm photographic frame -- are for the photographer’s subjects. If we do
choose to read these panes as frames, we see how few of them are any good: while the bottom
right frame captures childhood anarchy beautifully, other frames are unresolved, while the
frames showing the distant tree line merely feel flat. This all stands in marked contrast to the
quietly focused imaginative labor of the boy inside by the window. While he and Burri are both
bounding characters in space, the boy’s task is easier, as he commands his subjects with his
imagination, while Burri’s subjects (literally) have minds of their own. Although no written
confirmation has been found, the photograph could be read as an indication of Burri’s disdain for
Finsler’s small and static tabletop creations, and his delight (and frustration) in capturing the
enormous outside world in motion. If scale in the composition is any indicator, the large
windows suggest Burri’s is the greater goal compared to that of the small boy. Ultimately,
Burri’s photograph is a statement of the question of how to give form to chaos, not an answer to
it. That would come later with the telephoto lens, which would allow him to gather up great
swathes of the real world into compositions just as carefully crafted as any of Finsler’s.
Upon leaving school, Burri entered a photography community dominated by sentimental
patriotic imagery and the increasingly hidebound Neue Sachlichkeit -- and yet, a new and more
vivacious form of Swiss documentary photography beckoned to young photographers such as
Burri. As fascism had metastasized on Switzerland’s northern border, Swiss media had
emphasized the so-called Heimat image of Switzerland. This patriotic imagery emphasized the
beauty, grandeur, and defensive function of the country’s mountain ranges, and the peasant
culture which thrived in the valleys. For example, this September 8, 1939 cover of Zürcher

46
Illustrierte features a young woman wearing a traditional Swiss dress with cuffs and collar of
lace. (Figure 2.21) She gazes dutifully upwards, a profusion of flowers clutched to her chest.
What counted in the Heimat style during this tumultuous time was the ability to project a united
cultural front in a complex nation composed of French, German, and Italian speakers, with
economy and visual clarity.211
Even the once-cutting edge Neue Sachlichkeit had lost its cachet. In response to a 1949
overview of contemporary Swiss photography presented work with the static, sharply focused
look that had become so routine, art historian Georg Schmidt wrote:
This Swiss form of ‘New Photography’ had even succeeded in molding
photography, the exemplary weapon of truth itself, into a shield with which to hide
the truth, into an instrument for making things seem more beautiful than they are,
with the most objective methods employed to this end.212
Some voices demanded more life in Swiss photography. Art historian Werner
Schmalenbach curated a 1949 exhibition entitled “Photographie in der Schweiz - heute” of
reportage which embraced movement, blurring, and graininess -- which captured “life in all its
flow, in seriousness and in play, charm and horror, to simply but eloquently state, ‘so ist dast
Leben (life is like this).’” The same year, the new editor of Camera magazine, Walter Läubli,
dedicated an entire issue to the young Robert Frank. Alongside photos from Switzerland, Spain,
France, South America, and New York City, Läubli rhapsodized about the young photographer:
Thus out of the simple commonplace occurrences of our day, from events on the
street, come these photographs which the photographer has captured so
spontaneously, with results so true to life in their interpretation that they could be
considered pictures documentary of our time. Robert Frank: loves truth,
unvarnished fact. However, he also loves to capture movement and to incorporate
it in the atmosphere of his pictures.213
211 Martin Gasser, “From National Defence to human expression: Swiss photography 1939–49,” History of
Photography 22, no. 3 (1998): 230. 212 Ibid 232. 213 Walter Läubli, “Robert Frank,” Camera, December 1949, 360.

47
Two photos by Frank in that issue, “After rain,” and “Macy-Parade” (Figure 2.22) convey
the pleasures of the urban glance many feel but few can capture visually. A skyscraper reflected
in a street puddle, a helium balloon in the shape of a man soaring overhead -- the photos are
fragments, as all photos necessarily are, but they are fragments which suggest a greater, more
complex world outside the frame, one not marked by deadening, assembly-line Neue
Sachlichkeit regularity, but by whimsy and chance. This new mode was not restricted to
Switzerland, of course. Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1946 exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art and 1952 publication of Images à la Sauvette offered further evidence of the shift, as
did Family of Man. (Steichen and Robert Frank, acting as the former’s assistant during
Steichen’s time in Switzerland, actually visited Finsler’s photo class, hoping to find work to
include in the show.214 Steichen was dismissive of what he saw; “I need photographs of people,”
he sniffed. Finsler was mortified.215)
The exhausted Neue Sachlichkeit style and the stifling conformity of the Heimat style
must have presented repeated frustrations to young photographers like Burri. Recalling this time
of his life many years later, he told an interviewer:
I would go on excursions with friends, and at the end of each ascent I would untie
myself from the rope and rush to the top. It was not vanity to be the first. I wanted
to have the view, to see the horizon, to go beyond it and see the world. Instead,
when I reached the top, I saw only mountains again. The camera, I thought, would
be my chance to tear myself away from the Swiss mountains.216
214 Steichen and Frank visited the home of fellow Swiss Jakob Tuggener in October of 1952, and Steichen ultimately
included ten of his photos in Family of Man. Steichen’s visit to Finsler’s class was most likely made at this same
time. See Martin Gasser, “Jakob Tuggener: Photographs, 1926-1956” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1996), 8.
Kristen Gresh, “The European Roots of The Family of Man,” History of Photography 29, no. 4 (2005): 335. 215 Steichen sought what he called “everydayness,” and found much of it not in Switzerland but in France. Images by
French photographers often demonstrated, in his words, a “tender simplicity, a sly humor, a warm enthusiasm…and
convincing aliveness.” Gresh, 335. Koetzle, 17. 216 René Burri, “‘Moment!’ In Lebenswerk des Magnum-Photographen René Burri: zusammengerechnet höchstens
vier Minuten," Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin 43 (October 1997): 22.

48
Burri left school in 1953 and began military service, during which time he got his first taste of
taking photographs professionally.217 In that new role, his good eye as well as an amiable
personality and networking skills quickly led him to the doorstep of photojournalism agency
Magnum Photos.
Werner Bischof had since joined Magnum and had become particularly close with
influential founding member Henri Cartier-Bresson. They had bonded over shared interests in
India and the Far East, as well as painting and drawing, and a common frustration with editorial
work.218 Bischof showed Burri’s work to his Magnum colleagues Robert Capa, David “Chim”
Seymour, Ernst Haas, and Cartier-Bresson, who all admired it.219 Burri should continue working,
Bischof told him, and he would get back in touch after his upcoming trip to South America. The
call never came, as Bischof died tragically in a road accident in the Andes in May of 1954.220
On his own, Burri presented photographs he had made of Mimi Scheiblauer to Trudy
Felliou, Magnum’s Paris bureau chief. A Swiss education pioneer, Scheiblauer introduced music
and eurythmics to the education of deaf, blind, and developmentally challenged children.221 She
borrowed the concept of eurythmics from her professor, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who had
developed it as an alternative method of training professional musicians, in which they honed
their musical abilities by practicing, and paying close attention to their own rhythmic body
movement.222 Scheiblauer believed she could help deaf children learn to speak by encouraging
similar movement as well as musical play. She taught them to pay attention to touch, and more
217 Douglas Martin, “René Burri, Photographer of Picasso and Che, Dies at 81” New York Times, October 22, 2014,
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/arts/rene-burri-photographer-of-picasso-and-che-dies-at-81.htm 218 Halter, 244. 219 Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 127. 220 Ibid. 221 Andrea Korenjak, “From moral treatment to modern music therapy: On the history of music therapy in Vienna (c.
1820–1960),” Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 27, no. 5 (2018): 348. 222 “Eurythmics,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed January 9, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/art/eurythmics.

49
broadly, kinesthetics, so they could better modulate the vibrations of their own voices. Burri’s
photos show the young children, often with eyes closed, concentrating intensely on the
instruments in their hands, (Figure 2.23) resting their head on the piano Scheiblauer is playing,
(Figure 2.24) and dancing in a line. (Figure 2.25) They are moving images about persevering in
the sensory world while deprived of sensation, a theme Burri would revisit, unexpectedly, during
the Northeast blackout a decade later. The difference between the two sets of work is important;
in the first, Burri treats his medium as transparent; in the second, a profound self-reflexivity is
obvious. Felliou requested copies of the work. Burri was surprised when, a few weeks later, he
received an issue of Life magazine in the mail in which his story appeared, followed by the credit
“René Burri -- Magnum Photos.”223 (Figure 2.26)
Burri, Architecture, and Photography
Architecture as Iconography
Just as with his mentor Finsler, architecture would become an enduring subject matter in
Burri’s photography. At the age of twenty-two, Burri began what would become a decades-long
photography project about his fellow Swiss, the modernist architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965.)
Burri would have many opportunities to see and communicate with Le Corbusier in his lifetime.
He photographed both the architect and his buildings in fifteen of the fifty years between 1955
and 2004 and published the results widely. (Figure 2.27-2.28) Burri’s digitized archive suggests
the first encounter came in 1955, when Burri photographed the inauguration of the architect’s
daring Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp in northeastern France. Burri made images
of the architecture, (Figure 2.29) as well as the architect meeting with clergymen, (Figure 2.30)
223 Chris Boot, Magnum Stories (London: Phaidon, 2004), 50.

50
worshippers lighting candles, (Figure 2.31) and crowds listening to speeches. (Figure 2.32) He
photographed Le Corbusier in the architect’s Paris studio (Figure 2.33) and in his apartment.
(Figure 2.34) He captured intimate details, such as a set of hand-drawn and photographic
mementoes pinned to the wall showing the architect’s mother and wife, who had died two years
prior. (Figure 2.35) They followed each other’s work. In one letter, Le Corbusier sternly
reprimands Burri for a photo of him that he didn’t like -- before asking Burri to send him more
prints.224 (Figure 2.36) Yet in a letter to Père Lecapitaine of La Tourette monastery, which Le
Corbusier designed, the architect wrote that Burri “is serious and does things very well.”225 (The
photographer later recalled, “our relationship was very intense, but not easy.”)226 In 1999, he
published a book of photos of the architect called Le Corbusier: Moments in the Life of a Great
Architect. And even then Burri was not finished; he continued shooting the architect’s work up
until 2004.
Architecture as Photographic Structure
That is the literal, iconographic expression of Burri's interest in architecture. If we define
architecture more broadly as the bounding of space, there is another figurative way we might say
it inflected the photographer’s work. Consider this anecdote of Burri’s about his transition from
stillife photographer to photojournalist:
When I left school, where we photographed only coffee cups in light, I suddenly had to
chase after my pictures. How was I supposed to use my camera when everything was
moving, people walking and everything running away from me? I would even call out,
‘Hey! Stand still for a second!’ It took a while before I could move at the right pace,
224 “J’ai à vous faire un sérieux reproche.” See René Burri, Le Corbusier: Moments in the Life of a Great Architect.
Boston: Birkhauser Publishers, 1999.
225 Daniel Naegele, Who Shot Le Corbusier? (Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2020), 126. 226 René Burri, For Le Corbusier (Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2006), unpaginated.

51
swim with the current…Pictures are like taxis during rush hour -- if you’re not fast
enough, someone else will get them first.227
Leaving the silent, hermetically sealed environment of the Finsler photo studio, Burri
found the world “moving” and “running away” from him -- just as the children in the Zürich
kindergarten had done. In the coming years, he would embrace a technique which would reach
into deep space to halt its ebbing, gathering up the ends of the world and tying them to its
beginnings, enclosing vast swaths of urban and natural landscapes into awesome photographic
compositions.
But before his photographs themselves started exhibiting this formal architectural logic,
Burri would have to work through, and ultimately break from, the style of his mentor at
Magnum. He had come to emulate Cartier-Bresson, using the same camera, driving the same car,
and explaining his own work using the Frenchman’s concept of the “decisive moment.”228 Burri
recalled, “I learned a terrific amount from Henri, just by being around him and observing him. I
would produce contact sheets for him to critique. I remember him turning them upside down to
study the composition.”229 Cartier-Bresson worked on the street, using cat-like reflexes and a
Leica to arrest the flow of life, forming intricate photographic compositions. (Figure 2.37) He
wrote that the camera “became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it
since I found it.”230 In fact, Cartier-Bresson insisted on a camera format (35mm) and lens focal
length (50mm) whose aspect ratio and degree of magnification most closely approximated that of
human vision.231
227 Koetzle, 18. 228 Miller, 128. Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2020), 210.
229 Miller, 128. 230 Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment. (New York & Paris: Simon and Schuster & Éditions Verve, 1952),
ii.
231 Amanda Hopkinson, “Henri Cartier-Bresson,” British Journal of Photography 136 no.6741 (1989): 18.

52
The binocular field of view most people experience is quite close to the 2:3 aspect ratio
of a 35mm photograph.232 (Figure 2.38) Our eyes’ side-by-side horizontal field is further
flattened by the superciliary arch and zygomatic bone obstructing vision above and below the
eye, respectively.233 Understanding magnification is only slightly more complicated. As light
enters and moves through a lens, it meets a succession of finely ground, convex glass elements
which funnel the light down to a pinpoint, followed by a succession of concave elements which
spread it back out, until it hits the film at the rear of the camera. (One can imagine the path of the
light inside the lens taking the form of two cones joined at the tip.) The further away the film is
from this point of divergence, the more time the light will have to spread out, making individual
details of the scene appear more magnified on the film. The closer the piece of film is to this
point of divergence, the less time the light will have to spread out. More of the scene will fit on
the film, and individual details will thus appear less magnified. (Manufacturers categorize lenses
using this distance, also known as “focal length,” written in millimeters.) In both cases, the
method of obtaining the result is exceedingly simple: increase the length of the lens to magnify
details and shorten it to demagnify details. At a certain point along the wide spectrum of lens
lengths in existence, the degree of magnification matches that of the naked eye. That occurs in
lenses in which the point of divergence is 50mm from the film; we call these “50mm” lenses, or,
due to their similarity to the eye, “normal” lenses.234
According to Burri, Cartier-Bresson restricted the photographers under his guidance to
lenses with focal lengths between 35mm and 90mm (which was likely the closest he could
232 Although the lens projects a cone of light towards the film, the resulting circle gets cropped into a rectangle by
the shape of the shutter.
233 Ulrich Teubner and Hans Josef Brückner, Optical Imaging and Photography: Introduction to Science and
Technology of Optics, Sensors and Systems (Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 21. 234 This only applies to the 35mm camera format. Medium- and large-format camera lenses have their own versions
of “normal.”

53
convince them to come to his ideal of 50mm.)235 Yet in 1960, while shooting a story for the
German women’s magazine Praline about São Paulo as the “Chicago of South America,” Burri
found himself on the rooftop of the Edifício do Banco do Brasil, the state bank.236 Far below him
to the left was the busy Avenida São João, while to the right, just a few stories down, on the roof
of an adjacent building, four men in suits appeared, “walking from nowhere to nowhere -- like in
a drama…the training with Hans Finsler probably came through here,” he later recalled, perhaps
referring to Finsler’s command of architectural logic.237 “At that point, I broke loose from my
mentor,” and he shot several frames using a 180mm lens -- much longer than he’d been
instructed to use.238 The result, one of Burri’s finest photos, is a vision of awesome urban
simultaneity, in which the entire sprawling city seems to appear, somehow, all at once. (Figure
2.39) The street far below seems to have reared up, to stand almost as vertically as the nearby
buildings; the cars look like they are about to slide down into a heap at the foot of the structure
on which Burri stands.239 Stranger still, those cars appear just as vividly as the men on the (much
closer) rooftop. Instead of fading away into a misty distance as one might expect, the cars seem
to occupy a vertical plane just slightly behind the one in which the men appear. Optics experts
call this effect “compression.”
We can understand compression as, in part, the result of some very simple geometry.
Imagine the following scene: evenly spaced, empty buckets rest on the ground. (Figure 2.40)
They extend in a straight line beginning one foot to your diagonal left. The line moves to the
235 Teju Cole, “Shadows in São Paolo,” New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/shadows-in-sao-paulo.html. 236 Arthur Ruegg, “René Burri’s Journeys to Brasilia,” in Brasilia, by René Burri (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger &
Spiess, 2011), 193-197 and 202-209. 237 Ibid. 238 Teju Cole, “Shadows in São Paolo,” New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/shadows-in-sao-paulo.html. 239 This is sometimes referred to as “steep perspective.” See Derek Keeling, “Technical: The Problem Of The
Scale,” British Journal of Photography 137 (April 1990): 23.

54
diagonal right until vanishing on the horizon directly in front of you. From your standing
position, you would be able to look down into the first bucket and see, if not quite its entire
bottom, then at least a good portion of it. Now, tilt your head up slightly and look into the
second-closest bucket. Due to the difference in perspective, your view inside will be significantly
curtailed, to perhaps only the very top of the rear wall. In fact, you will find an exponential
decrease in angle of view into these buckets as you survey them in succession (and a
corresponding decrease in the need to raise your head) until your perspective on one bucket will
be practically indistinguishable from that of its neighbor. Any two of these distant buckets would
offer us more or less the same view of its front facade -- if only we could see them clearly.
Concurrently, the apparent space between each bucket will quickly shrink as you survey the line,
until they start to overlap, and, at the horizon line, blend into one. But imagine if you looked
through a telephoto lens so that your view only included, say, three distant containers total. Even
though one clearly obscures part of the next, they would appear perspectivally identical, as if
they were flattened and stacked on the same picture plane like a spread of playing cards.240 The
camera lens also contributes to the effect. Since the lens’s depth of field increases with focus
distance -- which in this case is very far -- and since the camera image is sharp across the height
and width of the image, the scene would appear sharp across all three dimensions, with every
bucket crystal clear.241 This is why, in Burri’s photograph, the scene does not peter out, weakly,
into the horizon, but stands at attention, the distant cars as alert and present as the much closer
human figures so boldly silhouetted against the sunlit roof. The long lens, with its magnification
240 But this effect would diminish if we were to walk backwards away from the printed photograph, until at a certain
point, the perspective shown in the photo matched that of the surrounding environment. Similarly, a distorted wideangle photo would appear perspectivally correct if we viewed it from a very short distance. See Keeling, 23. 241 This effect is masked in human vision only because the low density of photoreceptors outside the central fovea
cannot relay a clear image to the brain, even if the lens has focused the scene perfectly.

55
and compression effects, can give an important advantage to photographers in certain scenarios.
But it requires an unusually large amount of light in order to work -- much more than a normal or
wide-angle lens. (To understand why, just imagine how bright a train’s lamp would have to be in
order to illuminate the far end of a tunnel.) As he would discover on the night of the blackout,
this was Burri’s Achilles heel.
Although Galileo had invented the fundamental structure of a long lens -- a convex
element which gathers and focuses light followed by a concave element that spreads it back out -
- for telescopes by 1609, it was not until 1891 that such lenses became available to
photographers.242 T.R. Dallmeyer, who had inherited his family’s successful optics business,
credited his photographer friend Peter Henry Emerson for giving him the inspiration to invent the
first such lens.243 Emerson had been making photographs of rural English communities and
wildlife, (Figure 2.41) but he wanted a long lens that would allow him to shoot animals from
afar, in order to avoid startling them.244 He proposed to Dallmeyer an unwieldy contraption with
a focal length of six feet “mounted in something very light and collapsible, such as in bamboo,
carrying the lens at one end and the sensitive plate at the other, in order to obtain large images of
distant objects.”245 Dallmeyer made his own version at a fraction of that size.246 (Figure 2.42)
242 Derek Keeling, “A Century of the Telephoto Lens, Pt.1” British Journal of Photography 138 (October 17, 1991):
23. The German scientist Adolph Miethe independently invented a similar lens at the same time. Carl Fuldner,
“Evolving Photography: Naturalism, Art, and Experience, 1889–1909,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2018),
274.
243 As Dallmeyer wrote, “I desire to record the fact that was at the request of my friend Dr. Emerson, to aid him in
recording incidents in Ornithology and Natural History generally, that the first Telephoto lens was constructed.”
Fuldner, 274. T. R. Dallmeyer, “Preface,” in The Telephotographic Lens (London: J.H. Dallmeyer, 1892),
unpaginated.
244 Ibid 177. 245 Keeling: 21. 246 In testing it, Emerson realized the telephoto lens could produce “close-up” images without the perspectival
distortion common to wide angle lenses when held literally close to the subject -- which can be particularly
unflattering in portraits. In 1895, he published a very short essay and portrait made with a telephoto lens to
demonstrate what he called the “naturalistic,” or undistorted, effect to a wide audience. Dyspeptic as ever, Emerson
declared that anyone defining the term otherwise is a “muddle-headed idiot,” an “incompetent operator,”
“unintelligent,” a “back-biter,” and a “Philistine.” Peter Henry Emerson, “What is a Naturalistic Photograph?” in

56
The same year he shot the São Paulo rooftop scene, Burri also shot a separate story for
Paris-Match about the inauguration of the new capital city of Brasília.247 (Figures 2.43-2.44) The
photographs chosen for publication tend to focus on architecture and use human figures small in
the frame mainly for scale. One photograph shows a massive exterior switchback ramp with antlike workers installing pale stone sheathing. (Figure 2.45) Burri’s high vantage point and
telephoto lens abstracts the scene, flattening the ramp down into two adjacent planes cut by a
sharp shadow, while drawing the pale red earth upwards. Another photograph shot looking up at
the twin congressional towers captures workers installing the same pale stone on the exterior.
(Figure 2.46) Instead of appearing to lean away from the viewer as they would to the naked eye,
the towers seem massive and undeniable here, and the workers clinging to their sides are dwarfed
all the more.248
Burri would continue making such images of bounded space throughout his career.
“Whenever there was a high-rise building,” he later recalled, “I knocked at the door and said,
‘Can I take a picture?’”249 Many of these telephoto images convey the exhilaration of uncovering
patterns and structures -- gestalts -- invisible to stubbornly rooted human vision. They present an
astounding view of the world, and yet are at the same time indexical. The results are spectacular
scenes -- often of otherness -- made for Western audiences, which pretend, in their everything-atonce compositions, to a god-like knowledge.
In one photograph, rows of Tokyo schoolchildren exercise in unison on a sports track far
below the photographer. (Figure 2.47) Another smattering of students join in, but from the
American Annual of Photography and Photographic Times Almanac for 1895 (New York: The Scovill and Adams
Company, 1895), 122-125. 247 See “Brasilia.” Paris-Match, May 1960. 248 Burri would photograph Brasilia at least two more times, in 1977 and 1997, and publish a book with the material
in 2011.
249 Teju Cole, “Shadows in São Paolo,” New York Times Magazine, August 19, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/shadows-in-sao-paulo.html

57
rooftop of an adjacent building. That the students extend across two planes suggests the sheer
scale of the athletic spectacle. Alternately, this photograph, made at the Bastille Day parade on
the Champs Elysées in Paris, compresses the figures of the varied spectators into a single plane
in order to then suggest the expansiveness of French civil society -- male and female, black and
white, young and middle-aged, casually dressed and dressed for the office, some dutifully
enduring the tedium, others anxious to get a glimpse through their binoculars. (Figure 2.48) Even
though the figures are more psychologically individuated than most of Burri’s telephoto images,
the photo still pretends to function as a synecdoche for the nation at large. Another kaleidoscopic
photograph shows merchants docked in a port in Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, Brazil.
(Figure 2.49) Burri has framed the scene so that every square inch is packed with detail. It takes
some time to even understand that these are boats, as equipment, agricultural produce, and
human figures obscure almost every hint of water below. Each man appears fairly small in the
frame and compressed together by the lens into a roaring clamorous crowd: they are no longer
men who happen to be laboring in a market; they are Labor itself.
If his telephoto images swept up so much of a given scene, Burri’s travel itinerary swept
up so much of the world. By the age of 27, Burri had worked professionally in France,
Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Gaza,
Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil.250 A verbal corollary to Burri’s allencompassing visual statements could be found in quotes such as this one, made early in his
career:
Today, unlike any other moment in history, the problems of rice farmers in China,
automobile workers in America and miners in German are, in the end, all the same.
The enormous social changes taking place in our age of technology reflected in
music, painting, literature and architecture are casting a new face for humanity.
250 Koetzle, 26.

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Tracing these developments, and conveying my thoughts and images of them, is
what I consider to be my job.251
The claim of knowledge, which compresses three continents and four distinct modes of
expression, is breathtaking in its audacity, and might be chalked up to Burri’s youth at the time
in which he made it. However, he would go on making telephoto photographs -- sweeping,
proprietorial gestures enacted across deep space -- for the rest of his life.
The intersection of spatial compression and hubristic knowledge claims are not without
precedent in visual culture. The allegorical frontispiece to Anton Wilhelm Schowart’s Der
Adeliche Hofemeister of 1693 shows a Rückenfigur in the form of a young aristocrat being
directed by his tutor to ascend a staircase built into a hill, each step of which is identical except
for the name of a different academic discipline, such as “Mathesis” or “Theologia,” chiseled into
its rise.252 (Figure 2.50) To the left of the stairs appears a worker training a horse (a stand-in for
the animal kingdom) and to the right, a worker tending a garden (a stand-in for the plant
kingdom.) At the top of the hill are noblemen and soldiers, older and presumably wiser for
having already made the climb. Upon scaling these steps to join them, the picture’s maker
audaciously claims, the young man will have mastered both matter and mind.
As was common in such allegorical illustrations, the artist sacrificed perspectival
accuracy for conceptual clarity. The men on the distant hilltop are scarcely smaller than the tutor
in the foreground, and the steps remain wide and their text legible even at the top; the effect is
quite similar to that of telephotographic compression. Not only has the artist visually compacted
these capacious areas of study (one of which is the comically grand “Historia Universalis”) into
251 Burri included the statement as part of his first ever printed portfolio of work, published in Camera magazine in
July 1956. Koetzle, 12.
252 Anton Wilhelm Schowart, Der Adeliche Hofemeister. Frankfurt: Hartmann, 1693.

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fifteen neatly identical shapes, but he has gathered them, through this trick of perspective, into a
shallow and seemingly easily-mastered space.
While this illustration compresses symbolic space into a frontal plane, another example,
much closer to Burri’s time and place, compresses Cartesian space into a transverse plane. Aerial
photography held a special interest to French anthropologist Marcel Griaule (1898-1956), who
was first exposed to it in World War I when he served as an aerial spotter and navigator.253 One
example of such wartime aerial photography, not taken by Griaule himself, shows a landscape in
eastern France featuring both buildings reaching up towards the sky and the vermiculite pattern
of trenches and bomb craters burrowing into the earth. (Figure 2.51) Yet despite these dramatic
changes in topography, from this height, the scene appears to be as flat as frost on a
windowpane. In his later profession, much of it spent in Africa, Griaule looked to aerial images
as a more reliable source of information than interviews -- but in his 1943 book Les Sao
Légendaires, this belief took a more sinister turn:
Perhaps it's a quirk acquired in military aircraft, but I always resent having to
explore an unknown terrain on foot. Seen from high in the air, a district holds few
secrets. Property is delineated as if in India ink; paths converge in critical points;
interior courtyards yield themselves up; the inhabited jumble comes clear. With an
aerial photograph the components of institutions fall into place as a series of things
disassembled, and yielding. Man is silly: he suspects his neighbor, never the sky;
inside the four walls, palisades, fences, or hedges of an enclosed space he thinks all
is permitted. But all his great and small intentions, his sanctuaries, his garbage, his
careless repairs, his ambitions for growth appear on an aerial photograph…With an
airplane, one fixed the underlying structure both of topography and of minds.254
Within the compressed space of the aerial photograph, society -- Griaule believed -- is
laid bare. When he writes “Man is silly: he suspects his neighbor, never the sky,” he excludes
253 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 68.
254 Marcel Griaule, Les Sao légendaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 61-62.

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himself from “Man” and implicitly links himself to “the sky;” Griaule’s god-like self-image is
nowhere more apparent.255 (If aerial photography seems too distant from Burri’s practice,
consider this image of the anthropologist crawling on his belly towards a cliff’s edge, camera in
hand, surely a pose Burri must have struck in his travels.) (Figure 2.52)
Making such photographs was not possible or even desirable every time Burri released
the shutter, of course. A fair number of the photos in his archive, such as his famous portrait of
Che Guevara, are notable more for their content rather than for their form. (Figure 2.53) But this
kind of “compression” photography constitutes some of his aesthetically strongest work. As
Martin Schaub writes, “Burri's strength…is the dynamic composition in depth. Hardly any other
photographer spontaneously manages to create such a dramatic division of foreground and
background.”256 But this would not prepare him for what was to come five years after his
revelation on the São Paolo rooftop.
The 1965 Blackout
The blackout of 1965 was unlike anything the world had seen before, in part due to the
tremendous natural forces which had been harnessed to power the region. The Niagara River
flows north, past Buffalo, into Lake Ontario. It is only thirty-five miles long, but it is the site of
drainage for four of the five Great Lakes -- a basin area of 260,000 square miles.257 Over its
course, the river drops some 300 feet, sending water roaring through at 220,000 cubic feet per
255 Sentiments and photographs such as these would have been familiar to Susan Sontag. Her October 1973 New
York Review of Books essay, later collected in On Photography, deplored the medium’s tendency to inflate its users’
entitled acquisitiveness. Loosed upon the world, the camera levels all, endowing the photographer with an ersatz
sense of understanding and mastery. Susan Sontag, “Photography,” New York Review of Books, October 18, 1973,
www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/10/18/photography.
256 Martin Schaub, “Pressephotographie nach 1945,” in Photographie in der Schweiz von 1840 bis Heute (Bern:
Benteli, 1992), 232.
257 “Niagara River,” Encylopedia Britannica, accessed April 11, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/place/NiagaraRiver.

61
second.258 (Figure 2.54) In 1678, a French missionary named Father Louis Hennepin became the
first Westerner to write extensively about the falls.259 (Figure 2.55) His writings, published in
1683, convey some of the awe and terror they inspired in him. “The river,” he wrote,
…is very deep in places, and so rapid above the great fall, that it hurries down all
the animals which try to cross it, without a single one being able to withstand its
current. They plunge down a height of more than five hundred feet…In the middle
these waters foam and boil in a fearful manner…the noise which they make is heard
for from more than fifteen leagues. I could not conceive how it came to pass, that
four great Lakes, the least of which is 400 Leagues in compass, should empty
themselves one into another, and then all centre and discharge themselves at this
Great Fall, and yet not drown [a] good part of America.260
Even in this early impression of the falls -- the future source of electricity for much of the
northeast US -- the line between grandeur and region-wide disaster is vanishingly thin.
Hydroelectric plants had begun creating electricity here in 1896, and by 1965, the
American and Canadian plants on either side of the river together formed the largest
concentration of generating capacity in North America.261 Held aloft by metal frame towers, five
230kv transmission lines carried electricity generated in the Canadian plant to Toronto and
beyond.262 At some point before the blackout, workers had modified the protective relays on
these lines. Relays monitor lines for excess electricity among other problems, and if necessary,
258 “USGS 04216000 Niagara River at Buffalo NY,” U.S. Geological Survey, accessed April 11, 2023.
https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/dv?
259 He was accompanying the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, on an expedition down the
Mississippi and Illinois rivers. La Salle would claim the region fed by the Mississippi and its tributaries for Louis
XIV, and name it “Louisiana” in his honor. See David C.G. Sibley, “René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, French
explorer,” last modified February 22, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Robert-Cavelier-sieur-deLa-Salle. 260 Louis Hennepin, “1678,” in Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mason Dow
(Albany: State of New York, 1921), 23-25. 261 Brox, 108. See Federal Power Commission, Northeast Power Failure, November 9 and 10, 1965; a Report to the
President, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office (1965), 3. 262 Electricity is often explained using hydraulics analogies; voltage is like water pressure. A 230kv line contains
about 2,000 times the amount of “pressure” that a home electrical outlet contains. George C. Loehr, “The ‘Good’
Blackout: The Northeast Power Failure of 9 November 1965” IEEE Power & Energy Magazine 15, no. 3 (2017): 87.

62
direct circuit breakers to close, therefore isolating the problem from the rest of the grid.263 The
workers lowered the threshold by which the relays would do this, yet somehow word never
reached the necessary engineers and system operators. The generators continued producing at the
same rate, and when a minor -- and very normal -- power surge occurred on one of the lines, the
line tripped. This created a cascading effect whereby electricity meant for five lines suddenly
traveled down four lines, causing one of them to trip, thereby shunting all of the energy onto
three lines, and so on, until every line had tripped. With every route leading from the generator
west into Ontario now broken, and with nowhere else to go, one billion watts of electricity
surged east across New York state, overloading its lines.264 Within 3.3 seconds, this torrent
reached Massena, New York (250 miles to the northeast) and severed the connection there
between Canada and New York state.265 Now, the western and northern parts of the state were
dark, but the eastern and southern parts were still connected to the larger grid. People here were
still consuming electricity, but with one major source of it suddenly gone, massive sheets of
electricity surged north from Pennsylvania and New Jersey to fill the gap.266 This in turn
damaged the connections between New York/New England and the rest of the eastern grid.267
Those connections were fully severed at 5:16:14.60pm -- just 3.5 seconds after the first power
line tripped in Ontario -- when a substation in South Slope, Brooklyn tripped.268 Now New York
state and New England formed an electrical island. The out-of-state generators that had been
sending power to this area suddenly experienced a massive decline in demand, and so slowed
263 Federal Power Commission, 20. 264 Loehr, 87. 265 Federal Power Commission, 20. 266 Engineers had designed the grid such that if one generator went offline, others would pick up the slack. Jonathan
Mahler, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York:
Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 180.
267 Loehr, 88. 268 Federal Power Commission, 20.

63
down to compensate. Power systems are extremely sensitive to changes in electrical frequency
(measured in hertz), and this slowdown caused the remaining generators in the northeast to
trip.269
Most of New York City, southern New England, and the area to the west all the way to
Toronto -- 80,000 square miles -- were thrown into darkness.270 Thirty million people were
affected, making it the largest blackout in world history at the time.271 New York City was hit
hardest; power there was out between eight and thirteen hours and left the transportation and
communication infrastructures in a tangled mess.272 The blackout arrived at peak commuter time,
leaving 800,000 commuters stranded in subway cars (Figure 2.56) -- 1,700 passengers on the
Williamsburg Bridge crossing the East River alone. Since all 720 miles of track had to be
patrolled before trains could run again, it wasn’t until 8:30 the following morning that service
was fully operational. Although rail service at Penn Station was not affected because its
headquarters in New Jersey did not lose power, Grand Central Station service was halted until
the next morning.273 Traffic lights did not function, so ordinary New Yorkers volunteered to
direct cars.274 Airport control towers maintained power through auxiliary generators, but officials
had to cancel or divert 250 flights.275 People stood in the street, waiving down taxis, offering
ever-higher fees: “thirty dollars to Brooklyn!” or “ten dollars to the Village!”276
269 Loehr, 89. 270 Staten Island and southwest Brooklyn maintained power due to a single transmission line between Staten Island
and New Jersey. Maine’s electrical operators were able to sever the state’s connections from the failing grid in time
to save their own. Ibid 89. Brox, 238. 271 “The Ten Worst Blackouts of the Last Fifty Years,” Progressive Digital Media Oil & Gas, Mining, Power,
CleanTech and Renewable Energy News (January 14, 2015): 2. 272 Federal Power Commission, 3. 273 Ibid 38. 274 Some of the more memorable volunteers included a brown-robed Franciscan friar and an elderly man in a tuxedo.
See “The Northeast: The Disaster That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html
275 Federal Power Commission, 38. 276 The staff of the New York Times, The Night the Lights Went Out, ed. A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb (New
York: New American Library, 1965), 11.

64
The fact that the city’s inhabitants remained largely peaceful does not negate the fact that
the 1965 blackout profoundly upset Americans’ blind faith in the infrastructure powering their
lives.277 Electricity was no longer “black boxed,” to borrow a term from the sociology of
technology, but in its spectacular failure, a failure which had cast an entire region into darkness,
it had become highly visible.278 As a Time magazine report from the period noted, “seldom had
Americans been more aware of their dependence on machines.”279 This was felt in its time as a
deep, internal disorder, a kind of tectonic event.280 As one particularly eerie essay in the Times
put it,
We were all told again and again that it could never happen…We could go about
our business without fear of the dark…With the blackout these fears came back,
and stronger, because our experts had proved to be so wrong…One way or another
it made most of us in the dark realize acutely that the dilemma of modern man is
that he lives in a society he does not really understand and cannot really control.281
The blackout not only produced a tremendous amount of uncertainty, but it also tested the
media’s ability to resolve that uncertainty. Telegraphs failed across the city and were only
restored at 7:40 the next morning. Phone service remained active, although the huge number of
people suddenly trying to place calls led to frequent technical delays.282 (Figure 2.57) All nine
TV stations went off the air until the following morning, but radio stations were able to function
277 Only two people died as a result of the blackout in New York City: one from falling down stairs, the other from
climbing up stairs. Police made a quarter the number of arrests of a normal night. See “The Northeast: The Disaster
That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html. 278 Stephen Graham, “When Infrastructures Fail,” in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. Stephen
Graham and Simon Marvin (Florence: Routledge, 2010), 6, 7.
279 According to an article in Time, “when power failed in the $37,500 Queens home of Mechanical Engineer Edwin
Robbins, the result was pure farce. Nothing worked, not the multitone door chimes or the intercom system, not the
Danish dining-room chandelier or the bedroom clocks, not the hair dryer or the electric blankets, not the can opener
or the carving knife, not the toothbrush or the razor. Not even the electric-eye garage door. For dinner, the
Robbinses had charcoal-broiled steaks grilled over a primitive backyard barbecue.” “The Northeast: The Disaster
That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html 280 Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, 70. 281 The staff of the New York Times, 15. 282 Federal Power Commission, 38.

65
with the help of backup generators (some dating back to World War II that were to be used in
case of enemy attack.) Handheld, battery-powered radios suddenly became precious. As a
Newsweek article from the time recalled, “on the streets, crowds clustered around delivery boys
whose tiny sets assured the public that the nation wasn’t under attack.”283 Reporters for the AP
and UPI relayed their findings from the field via shortwave radio to headquarters, where their
colleagues wrote up stories by candlelight and read them over the telephone to the Washington
and Chicago bureaus. Photographers for the AP took pictures and then rushed the film across the
river to Newark for development. It was in Newark that the New York Times printed its morning
edition, its managing editor having made an arrangement to borrow a local paper’s presses. Back
in the Times’ Manhattan office on West 43rd Street, writers typed by the light of fifty flashlights
and candles “obtained from a store, two hotels and two Catholic churches.” The paper was able
to put 500,000 copies of a ten-page edition on newsstands by early morning.
284 (Figure 2.58)
In the absence of a fully functioning news media, or obvious explanations such as high
winds or lightning, rumors spread.285 “Was there anyone whose mind was not touched, at least
fleetingly, by the conviction that this was it,” an essayist for the New Yorker put it a few days
later, “that the missiles were on the way, and Doomsday was at hand?...people around us began
speculating extravagantly, enjoying the rare privilege of too little news.”286 Others suspected
sabotage; a Cuban UN official assured a US delegate, “you can't blame me. I was right here all
the time.”287 Some suspected the Chinese government, others the anti-Vietnam war protesters,
and still others an earthquake.288 Women’s Wear Daily claimed the blackout had been caused by
283 “Lighting Up the Blackout,” Newsweek 66, no. 21, (November 22, 1965): 92. 284 Ibid. 285 Ibid. 286 “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, November 20, 1965, 43. 287 “The Northeast: The Disaster That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html.
288 Brox, 238.

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the testing of a top-secret Pentagon weapon called “Fireball,” which supposedly drew all of New
York’s electricity and focused it into beams in order to create “a mammoth burst of artificial
lightning” which would disable incoming enemy missiles.289 Radio station WHAM in Rochester
issued false warnings of looting, and then had to spend several hours reassuring listeners that
they had been wrong.290 Early news reports turned out to be wildly inaccurate, claiming that all
of Canada was dark, as well as the Eastern Seaboard down to Miami, and areas as far west as
Chicago.291 One middle-aged man was playing a vigorous game of basketball at the time and
upon seeing the lights dim, wondered if he was experiencing a massive coronary.292 A waiter
who had just received an allergy vaccine guessed that his loss of sight might be due to having
received the incorrect shot.293
Neither objective measurements nor subjective impressions of the event from the time
seemed to make sense. Meters at the massive Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant rocketed from
1,500 megavolts to 2,250, and then plummeted to zero. “The needle came clear off the paper!”
recalled one engineer. “There were more squiggly lines than in an earthquake.”294 The outlandish
nature of the event is captured poetically in a period essay in the New Yorker. With artificial light
gone, moonlight “lay on the streets like thick snow, and we had a curious, persistent feeling that
we were leaving footprints in it.” The Plaza Hotel (just across the street from where Burri was
when the lights went out) appeared as “a gigantic, snowy iceberg riding the night sea.” For once,
all shadows fell in the same direction, away from the Moon, giving the city a curious “tilted
289 “The Northeast: The Disaster That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html.
290 “Lighting Up the Blackout,” 92. 291 Brox, 240. 292 “The Northeast: The Disaster That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html.
293 Ibid. 294 Ibid.

67
aspect.” Passersby “appeared foreshortened as they passed; they made us think of people running
downhill.”295
When the power went out, Burri had to rummage around for film in the dark, and he
almost certainly did not know the sensitivity of the rolls he found. Thirty-five-millimeter film in
1965 did not have the film “speed,” i.e. sensitivity, written on either the box or the roll itself, but
rather inconveniently, only on a data sheet inside the box. (The box, roll, and data sheet also
lacked any haptic indicators of speed -- unlike the Instamatic film mentioned earlier.)296 Perhaps
the film Burri found had already been separated from its data sheet, or perhaps the data sheet was
present but illegible in the dark. In any case, Hans-Michael Koetzle, who knew Burri and curated
an exhibition of this work, wrote in an introduction to his 2009 catalog, that of the 8 resulting
contact sheets (each containing 25 frames for a total of 200), there are “scarcely more than 40
readable pictures,” and indeed, “many of the [other] frames are black.”297 This math discounts an
alternative theory -- that while Burri did not know the ISO of the single roll of film he found
already loaded into the camera, he did discover it upon loading the seven successive rolls,
perhaps with the use of a flashlight. Let us assume that none of the frames on the first roll
showed readable pictures. But this would have meant that out of the 175 frames of which he did
know the ISO, only 40 show legible scenes, for a success rate of just 23 percent. This simply
would not have happened to a professional photographer, certainly not one of Burri’s skill.
Professionals can fairly accurately judge the appropriate aperture and shutter speed for a given
scene as long as they know the film’s ISO. Together with Gustavson’s insight, the fact a
photographer of Burri’s skill failed to create even legible scenes in 3 out of 4 frames strongly
295 “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, November 20, 1965, 46. 296 Todd Gustavson, curator of technology at the George Eastman House, email to the author, January 20, 2022.
Today, both boxes and rolls display this information clearly.
297 Burri and Koetzle, unpaginated.

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suggests that Burri was unaware of the kind of film he was using – that he was literally and
figuratively shooting in the dark. It turned out that the film was relatively “slow,” or light
insensitive; with the ISO rating of two hundred, it was only meant for use in full daylight.
The light sensitivity of a piece of film is a function of the size of the grains of silver
embedded within it. There are many light-sensitive materials in existence (two thousand years
ago, Phoenicians found that the yellow slime of the Purpura snail turned a beautiful, if
malodorous, purple when exposed to light. They used it to create Tyrian Purple cloth, which they
exported across the globe.298) (Figure 2.59) But silver has been used in photography since the
early 19th century due to its high light sensitivity, and the ease with which any unexposed silver
can be washed out later in the developing process. Film contains a form of silver atom that is
chemically imbalanced with one extra (positively charged) proton.299 When hit by light, that
atom gains one (negatively charged) electron, creating stable silver, that, after a second step of
chemical development, becomes the visible “black” matter in black and white photography.300
“Faster” films simply have larger clumps of positively charged silver which are therefore easier
for photons to hit.301 Besides increasing the film’s sensitivity, large grains create a coarse
appearance in the image, similar to how the dot matrix makes a newsprint halftone photo less
subtle than a print made in the darkroom from the same negative.302
Without this key piece of information, Burri would not have known how much of the
scene was going to register on the film. Would the camera pick up only a pinpoint trace of the
very brightest part of a scene, or would it get flooded with light? Would it record only the nearest
298 Alan Hodgson, “Silver Halide Materials: General Emulsion Properties,” in The Focal Encyclopedia of
Photography, ed. Michael Peres (New York: Routledge, 2007): 641. 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid. 302 Ibid 643.

69
object, or would it be able to peer down whole avenues? Drastic overexposure would result in a
flat white photograph, while drastic underexposure would result in a flat black photograph. He
could open the aperture to let in more light, but for how long should he keep the shutter open?
Or, he could keep the shutter open for a long time, but how wide should he make the aperture?
Since these exposure settings do not get recorded on the film the way that 1990’s-era cameras
stamped the date on each frame, it is not possible to reconstruct Burri’s working method. We can
only guess by examining the amount of motion blur (a side-effect of long exposures) or bokeh
(the overall blur that occurs in front of and beyond the lens’s depth of field, a side-effect of large
apertures.) Since these effects vary across the entire set of photographs, it is safe to assume he
decreased exposure a bit for brighter scenes, and increased it a bit for darker scenes -- but that is
no recipe for technical perfection, and it would have felt anathema to a photographer accustomed
to commanding great swathes of space and matter with his lens.
Navigating Darkness
Previous, comparatively-smaller electrical disruptions had proven alarming enough that
popular magazines helped explain the physiology of night vision to readers, and provided tips on
how to see and navigate during blackouts. A World War II-era Life magazine article noted that
“pilots, plane-spotters, coast guards, sailors and sentries on night duty” recommend people look
at things in the dark peripherally instead of directly, to make use of the highly sensitive outer
edges of the retina.303 (Figure 2.60) Harper’s noted approvingly that the English air force pilots
who fought at night were trained to acclimate in complete darkness for at least half an hour
303 “How to See at Night,” Life, October 5, 1942, 71.

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before getting in their planes.304 But readers were warned that even brief exposure to bright light
could ruin night vision, and that they would require one minute to recover it for every one second
of exposure.305 Some articles urged readers to practice paying attention to their other senses.
Sounds could help determine an object’s location. A German émigré pharmacologist named Curt
Wachtel, who had tested hundreds of toxic gasses for the German government in World War I,
recommended Americans pay attention to smells such as “sour milk, sour cucumber, herring,
decayed straw, horseradish, mustard” which may indicate either a poison gas attack or a
dangerous side effect of a bombing.306 One doctor recommended his colleagues wrap their
medical instruments in different kinds of fabric, so that they could be identified by touch
alone.307 Such advice gradually lost its relevance to new generations, however, as memories of
wartime blackouts and the even more distant era of pre-electrified American life grew dim. By
the time of the 1965 blackout, as David Nye writes, “few Americans under the age of 40 had
practical experience in coping with an unelectrified world.”308 René Burri was 32 years old at the
time.
Advice such as this would have been welcome, because strange things happen to people’s
vision in the dark. Scientists working during World War II noticed that in illumination levels
below that of moonlight, subjects’ judgment of brightness began to diverge from instrument
measurements.309 Observers often described blacked-out cities as fragmented and flattened. The
sprawling glow of Broadway, for example, was tamped down to a few puddles or patches of light
304 According to the Washington Post, pilots had to wear opaque goggles before flying at night. Selig Hecht, “Seeing
in a Blackout,” Harper’s, July 1, 1942, 161. “Blackout Hard On City Eyes,” Washington Post, April 26, 1942, L9. 305 Sandy Isenstadt, “Groping in the Dark: The Scotopic Space of Blackout,” Senses and Society 7, no. 3 (2012):
313.
306 Ibid 222. 307 Isenstadt, “Groping in the Dark: The Scotopic Space of Blackout,” 315. 308 Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, 69. 309 Moonlight levels are defined as 0.02 foot-candles, or 0.02 lumens per square foot. S.G. Hibben and K.M. Reid,
“Comments on Blackouts,” Illuminating Engineering 37 (1942): 210.

71
amidst a much larger darkness.310 With windows blacked out, overhead lights off, and table
lamps fitted with blackout shades to focus the light, domestic interior space, too, turned into a
dark matrix in which glowing shapes floated.311 Such small points of light offered viewers little
sense of scale or depth312 The shift in urban experience was from one based on the continuous
perception of solids and voids to one based on fragmentary glimpses of flat reflective surfaces --
which is, coincidentally, the very translation that is photography. An essay about the 1965
blackout in the New Yorker described the effect as an “inexplicable snatching away
of…coherence and continuity.”313 The sprays and slashes of remaining light from headlights and
flashlights would have rendered the city’s space as a series of autonomous, luminous realms
sliding past each other in the night.
New Yorkers in windowless rooms, elevators, or parts of the subway system would have
experienced, at least for a short time, total darkness, and with it, bizarre, flattening
hallucinations. Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb’s interest in sensory deprivation stretched
back to his 1936 doctoral dissertation at Harvard, in which he examined the learning ability of
rats raised in total darkness. He spent part of the 1940s studying similar questions in primates,
and in the early 1950s, as a professor at McGill University, he began experimenting on humans.
In these early years of the Cold War, the absurd confessions seen at Soviet show trials had
caught the attention of Western defense officials. What could have convinced these suspects to
say such things, except for brainwashing?314 And how might such brainwashing be achieved?
310 Sandy Isenstadt, Electric Light: An Architectural History (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018), 227. 311 Authorities recommended civilians focus on activities that could be accomplished within the small confines of
these various lit areas, such as reading, sewing, or quiet contemplation. Isenstadt, “Groping in the Dark: The
Scotopic Space of Blackout,” 318.
312 Isenstadt, Electric Light: An Architectural History, 227. 313 “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, November 20, 1965, 43. 314 Mical Raz, “Alone Again: John Zubek And The Troubled History Of Sensory Deprivation Research,” Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 380.

72
Perhaps sensory deprivation could be the tool to make the subject more malleable.315 In 1951,
Hebb was invited to a secret meeting of intelligence officials from Canada, the US, and Britain at
the Montreal Ritz-Carlton, beginning what would become a years-long research collaboration.316
A young colleague named John Zubek would take up the mantle, becoming a renowned expert in
the field and another asset to the intelligence community. In 1959, he began receiving grant
money from the Defence Research Board, the same source that had funded Hebb’s work, which
he used to construct a plexiglass isolation dome.317 Self-contained, with a toilet and food storage,
and fit for either total darkness or diffused light, silence or white noise, the dome held its
subjects in complete isolation for, in one case, as long as two weeks.318 (Figure 2.61) Subjects in
Hebb’s and Zubek’s early experiments frequently experienced hallucinations. Their ventral
visual pathways were understimulated by the outside world, so these pathways became
hyperexcited, creating stimulation of increasing complexity where none previously existed.319 At
first, subjects described the darkness simply getting brighter. Next came pinpoints of light, lines,
and simple geometric shapes. These developed into what subjects described as complex and
extensive “wall-paper patterns.” Objects and figures then appeared, isolated against blank
backgrounds, “like cartoons.” Each variety of apparition seemed to be projected onto a flat
screen.320 This mental efflorescence, whether experienced by a subject in a lab, a sailor on a
becalmed sea, or a detainee in an oubliette, has a special term: “the prisoner’s cinema.”321 For
those subjected to total darkness (or featureless light, or simply a monotonous vista) the mind
315 Ibid 381. 316 Cecil Rosner, “Isolation,” Canada’s History 90, no. 4 (2010), 30. 317 Ibid 32. 318 John Zubek, Wilma Sansom, A. Prysiazniuk, “Intellectual Changes During Prolonged Perceptual Isolation
(Darkness And Silence),” Canadian Journal of Psychology 14, no. 4 (January 1, 1960): 233. 319 Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Vintage, 2013), 41. 320 Ibid 36. 321 Ibid 34.

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retains visual experience, but substitutes flatness for depth. In fact, Zubek and his team noted that
subjects’ depth perception remained slightly poorer even a full week after they had left the
isolation chamber.322
Even for New Yorkers who had the benefit of partial illumination from moonlight or
electrical generators, darkness would have felt claustrophobic. Psychologist Wolfgang Metzger’s
research into depth perception, spurred by the loss of an eye in World War I, noted that to one
subject, a darkened room appeared “absurdly small and near, like the skin of an egg stretched
immediately over the eye.”323 In a 1929 article in the New York Times, Mildred Adams wrote that
her city at night was cloaked in “a blackness so thick that one can almost touch it.”324 When the
subject is wrapped in darkness, encounters with the visible can leave them feeling battered. A
Scottish psychologist working during World War II expressed concern about the “serious
emotional effects” on people enduring blackouts, brought on in part by a feeling of helplessness
as “strange objects have a way of popping suddenly and unexpectedly into ‘sight.’”325
Some basic human physiology is helpful in understanding why even people with partially
illuminated surroundings experience visual flattening that is different from, but related to, the
kind mentioned above. The photoreceptors lining the rear wall of the eye come in two
varieties.326 (Figure 2.62) Cones allow us to see color and fine detail, but only work at high light
322 John Zubek, Dolores Pushkar, Wilma Sanson, J. Gowing. “Perceptual Changes After Prolonged Sensory
Isolation (Darkness And Silence),” Canadian Journal of Psychology 15, no. 2 (January 1, 1961): 85. 323 Heinz Heckausen, “Wolfgang Metzger: 1899-1979,” American Journal of Psychology 96, no. 4 (Winter 1983):
569. Wolfgang Metzger, “Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld: II. Mitteilung: Zur Phänomenologie des
homogenen Ganzfelds,” Psychologische Forschung 13, no. 1 (1930): 10. 324 Mildred Adams, “Shadows Cast a Spell Over New York,” New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1929, 6. 325 “Blackout Raising New Psychological Problems,” Science News Letter, July 27, 1940, 57. 326 The dilation of the pupil is the outwardly visible sign of the eye’s response to darkness, but its total role in the
process is miniscule. A fully dilated pupil makes a subject ten times more sensitive to light, while rods, when fully
“charged” with rhodopsin, can make the subject up to ten thousand times more sensitive to light. Debarshi Mustafi,
Andreas H. Engel and Krzysztof Palczewski. “Structure of Cone Photoreceptors.” Progress in Retinal and Eye
Research 28, no. 4 (2009): 290. Walter Miles, “Night Vision: Flying Demands Light Sensitivity and Form Acuity,”
Yale Scientific Magazine, October 1943, 11.

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levels.327 Rods excel at detecting information in low light areas. It requires just a single photon to
produce a reliable response in a rod, while it requires a hundred photons to produce an equivalent
response in a cone.328 (This is because rods contain the more sensitive visual pigment rhodopsin,
and because multiple rods feed information into any given bipolar cell, which then transmits it to
the brain, making it more likely that a given cell will become activated.)329 However, rods have a
poor ability to distinguish fine details, and, in luminance conditions roughly equivalent to
starlight or darker, they are unable to detect color.330 Across the retina, rods outnumber cones by
a ratio of twenty to one, making human vision strongly biased towards the interpretation of
darkness.331 (This is why photos taken of people outside on sunny days often show unexpected,
unattractive shadows under the eyes -- the camera is not able to peer into what looks, to us, like a
minor tonal variation.) As a result, the human eye can acclimate to starlight fairly well, even
though it is about one billionth the illuminance level of sunlight.332 However, our night vision is
fragile. A bright enough flash of light will cause all the rhodopsin in the rods to break apart at
once, initiating a phototransduction cascade that sends electrical signals to the brain.333 This
process, called bleaching, exhausts the sensitivity of the rods, allowing the cones to take over the
work of reading -- what the brain assumes will be -- a new scene of sustained illumination.334
When that illumination is not sustained, however, the subject finds themselves equipped with
neither rods to see in the dark nor light with which the cones can see.335 The chemical byproducts
327 Ibid. 328 Dale Purves, et al., Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 245. 329 Mustafi, Engel and Palczewski, 291. 330 Purves, et al., 245. 331 Mustafi, Engel and Palczewski, 292. 332 Krystel R. Huxlin, “The Human Visual System,” in The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, ed. Michael Peres
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 635.
333 Kara Rogers, “Rhodopsin,” Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed January 7, 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/science/rhodopsin. 334 Ibid. 335 Robert Louis Stevenson described lighting a candle while hiking through wilderness: “at the second match the
wick caught flame. The light was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the

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of this process will begin the slow process of “recycling,” or returning to their original rhodopsin
configuration, but in the meantime, the stunned subject is left with the impression of black velvet
draped over their face.336 Not only did Burri lack understanding of the cause of the blackout, but
he also lacked any knowledge of his film’s sensitivity, as well as his sense of depth. His ability to
see and photograph in deep space was gone. For Burri and the New Yorkers facing the blackout
of 1965, the night’s events foregrounded the material bases of both photography and human
vision, and the illumination needed to activate them, as never before.
The Photographs
Burri’s profound qualms registered in his photographs. Perhaps the very concept of
“night” took on extra meaning for Burri, something closer to Roland Barthes’ “metaphor of the
darkness, whether affective, intellective, or existential.”337 Unlike the newspaper photographers
who used powerful flashes to illuminate and precisely describe what was to them an urban
infrastructure story, Burri’s photos instead conjure an eerie vision of a city of uncertainty,
captured with a machine he could no longer trust.
Having wandered fourteen blocks south, Burri came across the gloomy hulk of Grand
Central Station. It was here that he photographed the scene transpiring under the iconic foursided clock perched on top of the information booth in the center of the main concourse. (Figure
2.63) Sometimes referred to as “the golden clock” despite its brass construction, it was built by
darkness of the surrounding night.” The same year as Burri photographed the blackout, two Soviet astronauts
participated in the first ever space walk and discovered a similar, but far more intense effect. “Sunshine in space is
violent,” they recalled, but the rest was “only blackness.” Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in
the Cevennes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 53. Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, “How Bright It Is
-- How Incredibly Beautiful!” Life, May 14, 1965, 44. 336 Rods take four times as long to recover from a light flash than do cones. Kara Rogers, “Rhodopsin,”
Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed January 7, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/science/rhodopsin. Dale Purves, et
al., Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 245. 337 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 171.

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the Self-Winding Clock Company of Brooklyn, and it marked a hive of activity.338 An article in
the Times from 1916 marveled at the clerks toiling in the booth below:
One of the most marvelous products of the present age is the man, or group of men,
in the ‘Information Bureau’ at a great railway terminal…His head is a psychologic
[sic] marvel, synchronized with the clock and the calendar; automatically he knows
‘what’s the next train?’ whether it be on a full-schedule weekday, or a slimschedule Sunday or holiday. His ready-reference memory for minutely exact facts
and figures goes a long way toward confuting the doctrine of human fallibility.339
For thousands of commuters who passed through the hall every day, the booth was an essential
source of information -- indeed, a Times article published only eleven years after the Terminal
first opened claimed that the terrazzo floor had been “worn down more than two inches from the
feet of passengers asking about trains and timetables.”340 (Figure 2.64)
On a normal day, the clock’s highly accurate and highly visible movements regulated the
activities of the countless passersby who set their watches by it, slightly altering their plans, their
bodily speed, and their sense of where they were in the day's journey into night and back again.
Conductors used it to time the lumbering departure of trains on the dozens of tracks extending
north, which altered in turn a million events both great and small, radiating out from this, the
economic and cultural capital of the Western Hemisphere. But in Burri’s photo from that
evening, the clock’s battery-powered hands have continued turning, currently showing 9:35pm,
even as its inner electric bulbs have gone dark, the trains have stalled, and commuters have given
up. The metaphorical “driving gear” seems to have disconnected from the “driven gears;” the
clock had become unhitched from all it once commanded. It moves, but people and trains sit idle,
even here, in this cathedral of time. But there is no clerk in sight; in fact, one middle-aged
338 Anthony W. Robins and New York Transit Museum Staff, Grand Central Terminal: 100 Years of a New York
Landmark (New York: Abrams, 2013), unpaginated, ProQuest Ebook Central. 339 “Questions of the Traveler,” New York Times, June 11, 1916, 9. 340 “All Day in Grand Central Station,” New York Times, February 24, 1924, 3.

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commuter has hitched herself up to sit on the counter behind which the employee should have
been seen. Instead of eagerly looking into the booth, commuters look out and around, chatting
idly. There is no information, no explanation for the night’s strange events.
A second photo shows a clock, as well. (Figure 2.65) But this one appears supersized,
looming over the heads of stranded commuters. It reads “Big Ben” and “Westclox,” and a
slogan, mostly obscured below, reads “Westclox Wakes Up America.” It is an advertisement,
one of many that covered the walls of the main concourse during the postwar period. (As both
workers and businesses moved out to the suburbs, the automobile challenged the dominance of
the train. Rail companies were eager to squeeze every dime they could out of large and
expensive stations such as this one, and selling ad space was one method.)341 The Westclox ad
had been hanging over the south entrance to the main concourse of Grand Central Station since
1959.342 Electric instead of mechanical, it stopped working at 5:27pm on November 9, 1965, just
the same as everything else plugged into the city’s grid. Yet the hour hand, frozen and standing
almost vertically, casts four successive shadows leftwards, towards the number nine. (Portable
generators fed a few emergency lights positioned around the terminal, creating these shadows.) It
is as if not just the clock but time itself had died and its ghost had started marching off on its own
strange tangent. Meanwhile, five men below are cast into an optical blur by Burri’s wide-open
aperture, and into a motion blur by their own gentle movements. The effect is phantasmagorical.
Their bodies seem to hum, leaving small phosphorescent trails in their wake. In Roland Barthes’
341 The most spectacular of these advertisements was surely the Kodak Coloramas, sixty-foot-wide color
transparencies, each lit up by more than a mile of cold-cathode ray tube. In them, actors often portrayed snapshot
photography as an attractive, social activity in irresistibly kitschy scenes of parties, dinners, and vacations. Alison
Nordström, “Dreaming in Color,” in Colorama: The World's Largest Photographs From Kodak and the George
Eastman House Collection, ed. Alison Nordström and Peggy Roalf (New York: Aperture, 2004), 5, 6. 342 David W. Dunlap, “In a ‘Summer of Hell,’ Grand Central May Be a Bit of Heaven.,” New York Times, July 5,
2017, accessed January 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/nyregion/in-a-summer-of-hell-grand-centralmay-be-a-bit-of-heaven.html.

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Camera Lucida, the author notes that early cameras evolved out of clock technology -- that
cameras were, in effect, “clocks for seeing.”343 Just as the power failure had disrupted time, at
least according to the logic of this image, it had in effect disrupted the time-based medium of
photography as well. If time cannot quite be pinned down, neither can matter.
Strange happenings continue outside. The once-solid tarmac appears to have turned,
under the raking illumination of car headlights, into a heavy, magmatic sludge. (Figure 2.66)
Much like the circuit of electricity across the Northeast, the once endless circuit of traffic is
broken. Burri aims his camera across the unsettling gap at a line of halted cars looking back at
him, as if he had caught the last boat out, leaving them behind. A glossy black shape at bottom
right, presumably a car, speeds into an unknown future, its edge highlights already ablur. If
moonlight transformed Manhattan into a snowscape in the New Yorker’s otherworldly
description, headlights liquify its streets in this photograph. But Burri’s work is far more
ominous. In linking two failing infrastructures -- electric and transportation -- the photo suggests
a dread of cascading collapse.344
In another photograph, Burri considers what it might have felt like to drive on such
uncertain ground. Commuters, packed together in a well-lit city bus surrounded by inky
blackness, attempt to peer out the windows into the unlit nighttime scene.345 (Figure 2.67) The
extreme contrast in illumination between inside and out meant these people would have only
been able to see their own reflections looking back at them (reflections which are always present
on such windows, but which are overpowered by the sun during daytime.) The passengers’ eyes
343 No matter that Barthes’ book would not come out for another fifteen years; timekeeping is a fundamental
function of any camera, and clocks are a common sight in photographic darkrooms. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 15.
344 Three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this would have been a familiar feeling to many. 345 With subways inoperable, buses were packed with people. As an essay in the New Yorker recalled, “one bus,
bulging like a troop transport, groaned to a stop in front of St. Patrick’s and was almost knocked off its wheels by
the sudden press of unquenchable optimists.” “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, November 20, 1965, 46.

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would have been well acclimated to the interior lighting conditions. But their known, visible
world, a bubble of light in a darkened city, would have ended just inches or feet from their faces.
Even if they were to exit the bus, it would have taken their eyes some forty minutes to fully
acclimate to the dark. Interestingly, for a moment, Burri’s vision would have also been limited to
the inside of the bus. This is because the primary source of illumination on the streets during the
blackout was car headlights, as well as some flashlights and perhaps some police and ambulance
lights -- in other words, sporadic, relatively small, focused beams of light. A forty-foot-long city
bus passing within fifteen feet of Burri, however, would have flooded his retinas with light,
wrecking his night vision. The bus lingered momentarily, blinding him to the darker world
around it, leaving both him and the passengers unable to see anything but what was inside it,
before pulling away and leaving his unseeing complete, if temporary. Intended as a record of the
passengers’ partial blindness, this photograph became a source of Burri’s as well.
A final example shows a waitress standing in a diner, weight resting on her left arm as
her hand grips the edge of the counter. (Figure 2.68) The fridges were not working, and the diner
would have wanted to sell its food as quickly as possible.346 Perhaps she is pausing momentarily
in the ensuing commotion, or perhaps no work was being done at all, with employees and
customers alike too distracted by the news to either order or serve food. It is hard to tell, because
the scene is so poorly lit. Some kind of focused light source, probably a flashlight, catches her in
the neck and jawline. Just outside this glaring highlight, we can see the upper part of her
uniform, medium-length hairdo, and the thick, dark frame of her glasses. The countertop extends
beyond her several feet, and a constellation of small point sources of light seem to float above it
346 A report in Time magazine from the period states that bars and restaurants across the city had a busy and
profitable night. See “The Northeast: The Disaster That Wasn't,” Time, November 19, 1965,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,834613,00.html

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like fireflies.347 Beyond that, the photograph reveals very little. Or does it? In reading about how
human vision, strongly biased towards shadow detail, would have rendered the scene, I decided
to experiment with the digitized photographic file to see if I could retrieve some sense of how the
scene appeared to Burri.348 (Unlike the scenario with the much larger bus described above, the
comparatively small highlight on this woman’s neck would not have been strong enough to
destroy Burri’s ability to see such dark values.) Sliding the exposure dial one way in Photoshop,
I saw the image dim out like a scene at the end of a movie.349 (Figure 2.69) The first to disappear
were the already faint midtones lending tiny amounts of definition to the counter and wall
beyond. Then the glaring spotlight on the woman seemed to contract, as if the flashlight’s beam
was being focused more and more. Finally, only the point sources of light in the background,
probably candles, remained, like the ever-present stars above us finally becoming visible with
the setting of the sun. Sliding the exposure dial in the opposite direction, I saw the darkness
coagulate into delicate form. (Figure 2.70) Shelves, signage, stacks of glasses all line the rear
wall. The woman’s expression became clear, as did the outline of her tall swirl of hair and her
other hand, resting on her right hip. Suddenly, a figure appeared seated at the counter: a young
man, about the same age as Burri, wearing a dark coat, his right arm resting on the counter. His
gaze travels between the woman and the photographer, but he appears aware of neither. His
347 Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 4. 348 (To alter the brightness of these photos is not to contradict Burri’s aesthetic intentions, because their received
level of brightness cannot be said to be intentional.)
349 Although Photoshop, a digital photo manipulation software, would have appeared outlandish to photographers in
1965, in fact it rehashes many techniques and terminology which would have been very familiar upon closer
examination. To darken an image in a darkroom, for example, a photographer would shine additional light through
the negative onto the parts of the print that need darkening, while using their cupped hand to block light from the
parts that do not. The corresponding tool in Photoshop is represented by a cupped hand. To brighten an image in the
darkroom, a photographer would wave a circular wand over the relevant part of the print, thus preventing light from
darkening that area. Photoshop uses a symbol of a wand for this tool. A photographer can do in Photoshop
everything a photographer of equivalent technical skill can do in the darkroom.

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mouth unconsciously open, jaw tense and eyebrows raised, he seems unsure and anxious, lost in
thought, just as our photographer is lost in the dark.
After power was restored and Burri realized he had been using “slow” film, thereby
underexposing his photos, he decided to use “push processing” to rescue his work. This simply
means he let the film sit in the chemical developer (the “second step” mentioned above) for
longer than normal, resulting in more visible “black” matter being created. More dark matter in
the film will result in more bright areas in the final print. (As a negative process, bright areas of a
scene cause corresponding areas of the film to darken. When light is then shone through that film
onto photo paper, the black parts of the film prevent light from darkening the corresponding area
of the paper, thereby creating a positive, or “normal” image.) But no amount of extra developing
time can make the completely unexposed shadow areas of a photograph suddenly display detail.
This is why Burri’s photographs have such high contrast: the bright areas have been chemically
forced to become even brighter, while the shadow areas never received any light in the first
place, resulting in flat expanses of black in the final prints.350
Every image shot by Burri that night displays these characteristics, but perhaps one can
stand in for the rest. The photo is largely an impenetrable wall of darkness. Floating in the dark
to the left, seemingly printed onto the surface of the photograph, are the mysterious words
“Golden Boy.” (Figure 2.71) A smattering of pinpoint lights form a gentle arc across the lower
part of the frame. But are they really arcing across the same plane as the text, or are they actually
forming receding perspectival lines? If that were the case, however, why would the nearest lights
be the most dim, and the furthest the most bright? Perhaps instead the inverted “V” shape of light
points towards the camera instead of away from it. This endless flipping towards and away from
350 Mike Gristwood, “Black and White Films and Papers,” in The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, ed. Michael
Peres (New York: Routledge, 2007): 651.

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the viewer only further underscores the resolute flatness of the rest of the picture.351 Not only did
the spaces of the city appear uncomfortably flat to Burri’s eyes in the moment of the blackout,
but they remained that way even later in his photographic prints.
The Grid
On the night of the blackout, Manhattan’s famous urban grid came to take on a
profoundly different aspect, moving from domination and utility to impenetrability and
hindrance, a journey which, I argue, recalls Burri’s own over the course of this chapter.
By the beginning of the 19th century, New York had fully recovered from the travails of
the Revolutionary War to become the economic engine of the United States.352 Its population
growing, city leaders sought to bring order to the relentless development of land.353 Yet it was
not clear the city had the legal right to design its own street layouts, and furthermore, the new
surveys it ordered often conflicted with landowners’ definitions of their own properties.354 In
hopes of avoiding confrontation, city leaders asked state leaders to appoint a commission from
whose higher elevation a more far-sighted and binding decision might emanate.355 The plan,
released to the public in 1811, was outrageously ambitious.356 The city in its current form
stretched from the southern tip of the island 2 ¼ miles north; the city in the commissioners’ plan
would stretch 5 ½ times that distance to the very northern tip of Manhattan -- in the words of
351 In fact, “Golden Boy” was the title of a musical written by William Gibson (based on a play by Clifford Odets)
featuring Sammy Davis, Jr., and Burri’s photograph shows the sign posted outside the Majestic Theater on West
44th Street near 8th Avenue at which it was playing. Davis, who had lost an eye in a car crash in 1954, also
temporarily lost vision in his other eye after he was accidentally kicked in the neck during one of the musical’s fight
scenes. Howard Taubman, “Theater: Sammy Davis in a Musical ‘Golden Boy,’” New York Times, October 21, 1964,
56. “Davis Back in ‘Golden Boy;’ Has No Eye Nerve Damage,” New York Times, October 19, 1965, 50. 352 John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1965), 296.
353 Ibid 297. 354 Ibid. 355 Ibid. 356 Ibid.

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urban design historian John Reps, “far in excess of what anyone believed would be needed even
in the distant future.”357
In the rush to project rational control into the deep space of this amoeboid island, nuances
of shoreline, geology, and elevation were lost. (Figure 2.72) As soon as the plan was revealed,
land owners on the northern edge of the city rushed to draw their own counter-maps, hoping to
force the city to accommodate them.358 According to one account, a vegetable seller flung
cabbages and artichokes at surveyors intent on dividing up her land.359 Even important roads
outside of the grid system were dug up, although some, like diagonal Broadway, survived.360
Facing stubborn resistance from landowners and the land itself, the grid’s master surveyor
defended the plan as a tool for the “buying, selling and improving of real estate.”361
Nevertheless, European visitors across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries came to admire
the American grid for, in the words of one late 18th century visitor, their “perfect regularity”
which made them “the best way of laying out a city.” In his canonical history of US city
planning, published the same year as the blackout, Reps suggests that foreign visitors “found in
this regularity and geometric order much to admire [since] they, as strangers, could find their
way about in contrast to the difficulties encountered in the older cities of Europe with their
winding streets of uneven width and random intersections.”362 Indeed, Le Corbusier made such
comments repeatedly about the Manhattan grid in a 1947 book. “Your mind is free,” he wrote, of
the “complicated game imposed on it by the puzzle of our European cities.” With this “Euclidean
clearness…you know instantly whether to walk, whether to take a taxi, or whether to catch the
357 Ibid 298. 358 Ibid 297. 359 Ibid. 360 Ibid. 361 Reps, 299. 362 Ibid 294.

84
bus on the avenue or use the subway…New York lives by its clear checkerboard…From the first
hour, the stranger is oriented, sure of his course.”363
A circa 1880 collage using a hand-drawn aerial view of Manhattan as well as
photographs represents the final realization of the grid’s designers, and not simply because it
shows the grid completed and fully occupied. (Figure 2.73) The map’s one-point perspective
lines -- which reflect exactly how a camera would have rendered the scene -- seem to lunge deep
into space and bring back to the foreground a few dozen small photographs of famous buildings
scattered across the island, now pasted to the surface of the drawing. From the nearby southern
tip to the farthest reaches of northern Manhattan, the map is rendered in precise linework, which,
along with the photographic additions, make the island seem wholly visible and totally leveled,
and the previous inhabitants entirely displaced.
When the power went out, however, the grid’s utility vanished.364 The epic sight lines
down canyons of steel and glass fell into darkness, shut down to small bubbles of dim light. The
dead-simple x,y coordinates rule, which had given even newcomers an instant mastery of the
city’s depth, seemed, in the dark, to switch to x,z coordinates, the coordinates of elevation, of the
impenetrable, frontal plane. An essay in the New Yorker described the event as a “sudden
evening blindfolding.”365 Perhaps appropriate for a literary magazine, the author described
walking down an “inky” staircase, implying that the inherently penetrating depth of this
363 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (New York: Reynal
& Hitchcock, 1947), 47,48, 91.
364 Ironically, this occurred during Robert Moses’ large-scale urban planning project which, in part, worked to ease
the flow of traffic by demolishing several of the oldest city streets and replacing them with street-level expressways,
one-way avenues, and highways. Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the
Postmodern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), introduction, e-book. 365 “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, November 20, 1965, 43.

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architectural feature had taken on the characteristics of the flat expanse -- not of the photograph -
- but of the written page.366
Conclusion
Hours passed, and the power did not return. Countless theories were bandied about on
street corners and in tiny kitchens. Small frustrations and minor accidents mounted, and with
them, anxiety. Burri was not only bereft of explanation, but also of fundamental information
about how his camera was functioning, as well as an adequate sense of spatial depth -- a sense he
had used previously like an architect, to command and order space and matter into majestic
configurations. In place of endless vistas was more often than not a claustrophobic blackness, not
only visible to Burri’s eyes, but also later in his finished prints. For a photographer used to
affecting a supreme awareness borne of altitude, the photos from that night register a deep, if
subtle unknowing. Hints of cascading infrastructural failure and personal anxiety were matched
by an eerie sense that time and matter themselves are no longer behaving as they once did. After
shooting late into the night, Burri collapsed into sleep on his kitchen floor, only to wake up the
next morning lying in a puddle of melted ice which had leaked from the freezer.367 The highflying photographer had been dragged down to Earth.
366 Ibid 44. 367 Burri and Koetzle, unpaginated.

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CHAPTER 2
Bruce Davidson’s Underground Nightmare
The Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson’s project Subway contains richly colored,
high-contrast, and often disturbing photographs of the New York City subway. Shot in 1979 and
1980, exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 1982, and published as an
accompanying catalog with Knopf the same year, it was republished with newly shot work by
Aperture in 1986.368 While newspapers and magazines at the time were discussing the subway’s
decline using statistics and straightforward press photographs, (Figure 3.1) Davidson
renarrativized the scenes he discovered in any number of increasingly outlandish ways. With
earlier photographic essays about a Christian mission for alcoholics, a college football team, and
other topics, it is only upon reading Davidson’s eloquent texts, written years later, that we see
that plaintive autobiographical statements smuggled inside “straight” photographs one might
well have seen in mainstream magazines such as Life. But Subway was different. Davidson used
a flash to inflame certain parts of the image while casting other parts into inky darkness. (Figure
3.2) The subway, already something of a dim lair, becomes bat-cave black. Concurrently, his
text’s metaphorizing -- A is not really A but rather B -- goes into overdrive, culminating, I argue,
in a comparison between the New York City subway system and the trains used to deport Jews to
concentration camps during the Second World War. (Figure 3.3) The photographs are
aesthetically successful and unique within the entire body of images of mass transit, even as they
reveal the darkened pitfalls which await the documentarian lost in the caverns within.
368 Gene Thornton, “The Subway Viewed Ambivalently,” New York Times, October 10, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/10/arts/the-subway-viewed-ambivalently.html. Laurent Roosens and Luc Salu,
History of Photography: A Bibliography of Books, Volume 4 (New York: Mansell, 1999), 77.

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Davidson’s Early Years
Davidson’s childhood had been emotionally turbulent. His father Arnold was a lawyer
who lost his money, law practice, and family at the racetrack.369 Academic difficulties and
intense loneliness trailed the son in his early years, and photography became a source of
consolation. “Most young boys have a buddy,” he said, “I had a camera.”370 On Saturdays, he
worked as a stock boy at a camera store. The owner mentored Davidson, teaching him how to
enlarge his photos, use a medium format camera, and make dye-transfer color prints.371 In his
senior year of high school, he won first place in the Kodak National High School Snapshot
Contest (Animal Division), and in 1952, was accepted (under probationary status) to the
photography program at the Rochester Institute of Technology.372
Davidson’s penchant for metaphor showed up early in his photography. In addition to his
schoolwork, he assigned himself various photography projects, one of which documented the
alcoholics who would visit the Light House Mission in Rochester to receive a sermon, a lecture,
and a sandwich. The soft focus and faint motion blur of one photograph of a man throwing back
a drink evokes the sensation of drunkenness (even though the beverage is presumably nonalcoholic, as the man is standing in the Mission.)373 (Figure 3.4) Meanwhile, a menacing
blackness extends across the bottom third of the image, subsuming the man’s torso and arms and
forming a pincer around his neck. A second photograph shows a man sitting in a chair in the
369 Vicki Goldberg, Bruce Davidson: an Illustrated Biography (New York: Prestel, 2016), 11. 370 Charlotte Cotton and Bruce Davidson. “Bruce Davidson.” Aperture, Fall 2015, No. 220, 96. 371 Bruce Davidson, “Introduction,”7. Dye-transfer printing is the method of making color photographic prints
Davidson would later use with his Subway project. Although complex, it produces a highly archival print and affords
the photographer great control. Suffice it to say, the process is similar to what a print shop would call relief printing.
One photograph gets separated into three gelatin reliefs, which are in turn dipped into cyan, magenta, and yellow
dyes, and rolled in succession onto non-light sensitive cotton paper. See Kenda North, “Dye Transfer,” in Darkroom
Dynamics: A Guide to Creative Darkroom Techniques, ed. Jim Stone (New York: Routledge, 2016), 186. 372 Davidson, “Introduction,” 8. 373 The photographs by Davidson in this chapter were found in Magnum’s online archive, accompanied by simple
captions. The archive can be found at pro.magnumphotos.com

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Mission, sipping from a tin cup. The deep wrinkles of his battered face contrast with the
velveteen softness of the chairs and the chalkboard smoothness of the far wall. Although he may
be facing the priest at the head of the room, his dark eyes seem to only see his next drink. (Figure
3.5) In hindsight, Davidson believes he had made the work as a stand-in for his own
childhood.374 Neither alcohol nor Christianity played much of a role in his household, so what
could such a striking comment mean? “I could feel something for [the men.]” he recalled in a
later essay written years later. “The way they looked, the way they existed, the way they needed
alcohol worse than anything.” Yet in the very next line, Davidson undercuts this professed
interest in the details of these men’s lives. “It was more about the mood and the desolation that
attracted [and] concerned me.”375 Whatever the reason, Davidson was able to capture the
gnawing feeling of all-consuming need met with a paltry response.
RIT’s photography curriculum was heavily weighted towards technical skill, and
Davidson found only one professor, Ralph Hattersley, who emphasized aesthetics. In his class
Creative Illustration, Hattersley often told the students that “the idea comes first.”376 (This would
prove to be sound advice for Davidson’s future commercial photography, since those images
illustrated his clients’ verbalized pitches, even if it is antithetical to the inductive work of, for
example, photojournalism.)377 RIT acted as a feeder school to the film giant Kodak Eastman, and
Davidson got a job upon graduating shooting dull product still lives in their Manhattan-based inhouse photo studio. On the weekends, he would use the studio for personal work, and in one
experiment, he discovered for himself the messiness of failed metaphors.378 “I placed a large
374 Goldberg, 24. 375 Ibid 21. 376 Bruce Davidson, Outside Inside: 1954-1961 (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2009), 8. 377 The photojournalist, at least in theory, collects local examples of visual evidence in order to then build a story or
argument.
378 Davidson, Outside Inside: 1954-1961, 8.

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plate glass between two ladders, broke three eggs [and shot] from below with an 8x10 camera,”
Davidson recalled of one of his attempts at alchemy. “I was hoping to create the illusion of
galaxies in a distant part of the universe, but I neglected to level the plate glass and the raw eggs
slowly slid off the glass onto the floor.”379 His penchant for double meaning was not lost on
others. Years later, when he was shooting frequently for Vogue, the magazine ran a short profile
of Davidson, pegged to an unsettling picture he took on the set of the 1966 Mark Robson war
film The Lost Command. (Figure 3.6) In it, local children pretend to be the actors by “playing
dead,” while an American-educated priest poses at the photographer’s behest. Interviewed by the
magazine about the photograph, Davidson replied, “You have to step into the picture, and you
have to step out and back.” The photographer, in other words, has to attend to composition,
lighting, timing, etc. while also considering potential secondary meanings. “This double vision of
his,” the magazine wrote, produces “environments that are almost allegorical in their sweep.”380
Ultimately, however, the marriage of corporate behemoth and slightly difficult loner was
not to be.381 Davidson quit Kodak, applied to the Yale School of Design, and studied there under
graphic designer Herbert Matter, art director Alexey Brodovitch, and painter Josef Albers. For
one class project, he photographed the school’s football team. In the locker room before the
game, the players’ brooding interiority marks them as alone even as they sit next to one another.
(Figure 3.7) A battered, sweat-drenched player on the sidelines rinses his mouth with water and
spits, his downcast eyes lost in shadow. (Figure 3.8) Another player, also on the sidelines, twists
a rag in a coil as he tracks the movement on the field. (Figure 3.9) “The football pictures weren’t
about football,” Davidson now sees. “They were about something else…I wanted to photograph
379 Ibid. 380 “The Naked Camera Eye of Bruce Davidson,” Vogue, August 15, 1966, 84. 381 For the best diagnosis of midcentury American corporate groupthink, see William Whyte’s The Organization
Man (1956.)

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tension.” He describes the meeting of their respective emotional worlds as if it had been the
mutual recognition of newly hatched insects: “I think that tension erased the cocoon, what was
inside of me and of them.” At this difficult period in his life, lacking friends and a conventional
career, he recalls -- in the very same conversation about football -- “my parents really felt that I
might perish.” Carrying that weight on his back as he held onto his camera, Davidson recalls, “I
felt privileged to see those young athletes in their most miserable time. I wanted to photograph
losers…”382 It is interesting to consider, however, that Yale’s football team ended the 1954
season with a record of five wins, three losses, and one tie.383 In other words, for every one game
they lost, they did not lose two games. Davidson submitted the work to Life and crossed his
fingers.384
In 1955, after only one semester at Yale, Davidson was drafted into the Army. Already
feeling restless and eager to see the world, he withdrew from the program. While in basic
training at Camp Gordon, he learned that his Yale football photos would be published in the
October 31 issue of Life.
385 (Figures 3.10-3.12) He spent the first half of his two-year
commitment in Arizona, and the second half at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
outside of Paris. While stationed there, he befriended and frequently photographed an elderly
woman named Madame Fauché who lived in Montmartre. (Figures 3.13-3.15) Her home was a
darkened garret overlooking one of the neighborhood’s windmills, surrounded by paintings by
her late husband Léon, who had once known Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Renoir.386 Frail
and at times exhausted, Fauché appears like the final, tenuous link to a cultural highwater mark --
382 Goldberg, 27. 383 “1954 Yale Bulldogs Schedule and Results.” Sports Reference, accessed July 3, 2023, https://www.sportsreference.com/cfb/schools/yale/1954-schedule.html 384 Bruce Davidson, “Life, Through My Eyes, Seen…” in Bruce Davidson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986),
unpaginated.
385 Teresa Kroemer, “Chronology,” in Bruce Davidson (New York: Aperture and Fundación MAPFRE, 2016), 308. 386 Davidson, “Introduction,” 9.

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one that must have felt all the more important to maintain given France’s postwar decline. The
photo essay would appear in the October 1, 1958 issue of Esquire. (Figures 3.16-3.17) While
Davidson has not spoken of this particular work in terms of metaphor, his time in France is
important to our story, as it allowed him to introduce himself and his work to the documentary
photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson at Magnum’s Paris office.387
After his two-year commitment in the Army ended, Davidson moved back to New York
and joined Life’s mentorship program for promising young photographers. He did not enjoy the
work. In one spectacularly misjudged pairing, someone at Life assigned Davidson to cover the
yearly tradition of freshmen class hazing at Muhlenberg College, which, for the first time in the
school’s century-plus history, included women. Captions framed the tradition as simple goodnatured ribbing, while at the very same time, photographs showed men ordering women around
on all fours, and making them endure, in the magazine’s own words, “taunts, tears, [and]
humiliation.”388 The dramatic arc is completed on the last page, with smiles all around and the
reassuring lesson that women, too, enjoy being hazed. (Figures 3.18-3.20) Despite a virtually
guaranteed offer of a staff position at the most important popular magazine in the country, the
twenty-four-year-old Davidson walked out after only a year.389
Riding the bus on Fifth Avenue one day, Davidson spotted Cartier-Bresson on the street
below. Davidson leapt out, chased him down, and reintroduced himself. The older photographer
invited Davidson up to the Magnum office, where John Morris, the international executive
editor, interviewed Davidson and admired his work.390 With the backing of Cartier-Bresson -- an
influential founding member of the agency -- Davidson became an associate member in 1958 and
387 Miller, 167. 388 Bruce Davidson, “Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,” Life, October 21, 1957, 112. 389 Bruce Davidson, Outside Inside: 1954-1961 (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2009), 295. 390 Goldberg, 44.

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a full member a year later.391 Despite his youth, he quickly became well-regarded in Magnum.
Josef Koudelka became a friend, as did Ernst Haas, who introduced him to a larger photography
network as well as to the financial lifeline that was commercial photography.392 Cornell Capa
came to see Davidson as “the son he never had.”393 His career flourished. Curators at the MoMA
included his work in five group exhibitions which opened in 1958, 1959, 1960, 1964, and
1965.394 A 1961 New York Times assignment to cover the Freedom Riders in the South led to a
long-term project and a Guggenheim Fellowship.395 (Figure 3.21) John Szarkowski gave him a
solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, featuring this Civil Rights work as well as
photographs made in Los Angeles, Wales, and England.396 (Figure 3.22) From 1966 to 1968
Davidson shot a project on what was widely reported to be the worst block in New York City --
East 100th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. His images of the black and Puerto Rican
inhabitants, taken with a 4x5 view camera, revealed not chaos and savagery as many expected --
despite the dilapidated buildings -- but rather quiet moments of introspection.397 (Figure 3.23)
Published as a book in 1970, the project earned Davidson the first ever photography grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as another exhibition at MoMA.398 (Figure 3.24)
Yet Davidson’s mood remained low. His first marriage quickly unraveled. The
expressive, colorful fashion photography he had been doing for Vogue made him feel, as Holden
391 Miller, 167. 392 Charlotte Cotton, “The Picture Man,” in Bruce Davidson (New York: Aperture and Fundación MAPFRE, 2016),
205.
393 Goldberg, 44. 394 “Bruce Davidson,” Museum of Modern Art, accessed June 26, 2024,
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2016/spelunker/constituents/6800.
395 Erina Duganne, “Bruce Davidson,” in Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 3-Volume Set, ed. Lynne
Warren (New York: Routledge, 2006), 364.
396 Jacob Deschin, “Photography,” New York Times, July 17, 1966,
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/07/17/82837558.html?pageNumber=90.
397 Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 165. 398 Paul Sullivan, “Tunnel visions,” Financial Times, November 6, 2004: 34.

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Caulfield would have put it, like “a phony.”399 (Figures 3.25-3.26) He started seeing a
therapist.400 For a time, he shared a $150-a-month one-room skylit garret in Greenwich Village
with a dying schefflera plant. He installed a red darkroom safelight in his fridge so he could print
photographs and eat cold chicken and frozen Hershey bars at the same time.
401 Davidson felt,
and saw, loneliness everywhere. He became friends with Diane Arbus, and says he empathized
with “the desperate pain of her aloneness.”402 He photographed in a topless restaurant in San
Francisco for Esquire, full of leering businessmen and half-nude women serving them lunch.
“The true subject of these photographs was not [the women’s] naked bodies,” Davidson later
recalled, “but their endless aloneness.”403 (Figure 3.27) While photographing a little person
named Jimmy Armstrong who performed with the Beatty-Cole-Hamid Circus at Palisades
Amusement Park, Davidson says “I felt his loneliness.”404 (Figure 3.28) Speaking of another
long-term project, this one about a gang of white working class kids in Brooklyn, Davidson says
“I wasn’t so much older than these kids [and] I could feel the emotional isolation.”405
Although Davidson had already been published in Life and became a member of
Magnum, it was the June 1960 publication of that story, entitled “Brooklyn Gang,” in Esquire
that supercharged his career.406 The text by Norman Mailer lent weight to the piece (and helped
Mailer underscore his own reputation as a writer who could access both the Establishment and
the demimonde.) (Figure 3.29) There is no doubt about it: the kids look cool in these
photographs. They have slicked back hair, they wear dark shades indoors, and they tuck packs of
399 Davidson, “Introduction,” 11. See J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. 400 Davidson, “Introduction,” 11. 401 Davidson, Outside Inside: 1954-1961, 298. 402 Davidson, “Introduction,” 12. 403 Ibid. 404 Goldberg, 47. 405 Ibid 51. 406 Duganne, 364.

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cigarettes into the rolled-up sleeves of their white t-shirts. (Figure 3.30) Couples make out under
the piers of Coney Island. One boy with eyes closed sits in gorgeous repose next to a Coca-Cola
fridge and a gumball machine. (Figure 3.31) But Davidson also captures many darker moments.
A fifteen-year-old boy named Bob Powers (aka Bengie) sits alone at the counter of the gang’s
candy store hangout, his face hidden in shadow. (Figure 3.32) Years later, Davidson’s wife
Emily would interview Bob, who said of these old photographs,
I see a fifteen-year-old kid who looks like he's in a lot of pain. I see a kid that wished
he was dead a million times. I hated myself…And a lot of what I did when I was
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen was…like a suicide mission, even up to being
a drug addict. It always meant that I was never afraid of dying, never, until the day
I got clean.407
A photograph of a young man rolling up his sleeve standing next to a young woman primping in
the mirror of a cigarette machine -- surely one of the iconic images of midcentury American
youth culture -- also has a tragic aftermath. (Figure 3.33) The young woman, named Cathy,
would later become addicted to drugs and take her own life with a shotgun, leaving a child
behind.408
Youth gangs in the US are as old as the country itself; the first ones appeared in the
1770s.409 In 1807, an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Lower Manhattan had to
plead with the City Council for protection from gangs of white youths who harassed its
members.410 In the early twentieth century, gang activity was common and fairly benign
(fistfights, breaking windows) compared to that of the century’s end. But from the mid-1940s to
the mid-1960s, the number of gangs in New York exploded. They became more racially charged
407 Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang (Los Angeles: Twin Palm Publishers, 1998), 4. 408 Ibid. 409 Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 89. 410 Ibid 294.

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and replaced their sticks, stones, and bottles with ice picks, knives, and homemade guns.411 After
World War II, New York was riven by turf warfare as slum clearance as well as migration from
the South and from Puerto Rico unsettled the racial makeup of the city.412 Between 1948 and
1951, reports of auto theft by youths increased by 61 percent, sex offenses by 37 percent, and
robbery by 25 percent.413
Whether crime itself went up or just the prosecution of crime is not clear. There is no
doubt that attention to crime increased exponentially. Coverage by the Times of youth gangs in
the year Davidson shot his project runs heavily towards a positivist, statistics-based form of
journalism. “In 1959 alone ten young persons have met their deaths in violence either directly
stemming from gang feuds or involving members of youth gangs,” the Times wrote, and “about
100 young persons have died as a result of gang warfare here in the last ten years.”414 There are
“150 potential street gangs” in the city, with a total membership “estimated at 6,500 to 7,500.”415
The NYPD has “470 men and women doing youth work, with 230 assigned to patrol duty.”416
Most violence occurred in small groups of youths, however:
The last big clash of massed youth gangs took place in Pelham Park, the Bronx, on
Memorial Day, 1955. Two hundred mounted policemen broke up two formations
of youths converging to do battle. There were about 250 youths marching six
abreast against an equal number awaiting the assault when the police intervened.417
411 Ibid. 412 Ibid. 413 Ibid 293. 414 Given the overwhelming amount of media coverage given at the time to the so-called “Capeman murders” of
August 29, 1959, perpetrated by a Puerto Rican youth on two white boys, Robert Young and Anthony Krzesinsk,
this article does a service by naming and describing the eight other victims killed that year. Their names were Daniel
Garcia, Anthony Labonchino, Earl Mack, Raul Banuchi, Sergio Quinones, Milton Graniela, Theresa Gee, and Julio
Rosario. See Emanuel Perlmutter, “10 Deaths Laid to Youth-Gang Action This Year,” New York Times. September
1, 1959, 19.
415 Ibid. 416 Ibid 8. 417 Perlmutter, “10 Deaths Laid to Youth-Gang Action This Year,” 19.

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One story in the Times from 1959 about juvenile delinquency is illustrated only with a
map of the city in which problematic neighborhoods are filled in with black ink.418 (Figure 3.34)
Another story from the same source and year includes a photograph of three juvenile
delinquency experts pointing at a map.419 (Figure 3.35) Another story includes a photograph of
the aftermath of the fatal slaying of a 16-year-old boy in front of a Bronx high school.420 (Figure
3.36) However, the photographer took it from the roof of a building across the street, rendering
the police and the dead body tiny in a frame dominated by the neo-Gothic architecture of the
school. At no time does one sense an individual author reacting to the trauma hinted at in these
images or crafting a personal response to it.
But this is not the story Davidson told. Recalling the gang members, who often hung out
and slept overnight on the beach, Davidson says, “my Coney Island was the Coney Island of the
mind, not the place…What I was photographing was not the gang, but a sense of isolation and
tensions within teenagers…I never felt a separation between myself and what I was
photographing…”421
New Photojournalism
Davidson’s work qualifies him as a New Photojournalist. Like New Journalism, the
better-known written equivalent, this is a capacious category, but both are self-reflexive modes
of describing and explaining the world. New Journalism was, among other things, an antiauthoritarian, 1960s-era response to the perceived bankruptcy of the “god-like” voice of the
418 Emanuel Perlmutter, “Gangs -- What They Are And What To Do About Them,” New York Times, September 6,
1959, 7.
419 Emma Harrison, “U. S. To Aid Plan For Youths Here,” New York Times, December 16, 1959, 46. 420 “Boy, 16, Is Killed In Gang Ambush At Bronx School,” New York Times, September 22, 1959, 1. 421 Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs, 1939-1963 (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1992),
330.

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authorities in the press and government.422 It allowed the reader to pull back the curtain and
observe the writer -- blinkered and positioned as we all are -- in action. Even though the writing
that emerged could be unbridled and irreverent, the underlying motive was, at least in theory,
ethical transparency. Self-reflexive documentary photography was not new, as Vanessa
Schwartz’s study of Ernst Haas’ 1950s-era motion-blurred photographs shows us.423 (Figure
3.37) Nor is it limited to the United States or Western Europe, as John Mraz’s study of 1970s
Mexican photojournalism demonstrates.424 Nor is it limited to the worlds of journalism or
photography, as a whole movement of anthropology begun in the same decade proves.425 Nor is
New Photojournalism another way of saying “documentary photos in books.” (Photography has
been a book-based medium since its earliest days, and there have been multiple periods and
places of highly “authored” photobook creativity, for example, in Germany in the 1920s, the
Soviet Union in the 1930s, France in the 1950s, Japan in the 1960s, and the US in the 1970s and
1980s.)426
While we are defining terms, let us disambiguate the second word in “New
Photojournalism.” Martha Rosler defines photojournalists as, essentially, hired guns, and
documentarians as photographers who choose their own subject matter, with no guarantee of
422 Adam D. Weinberg, On the Line: The New Color Photojournalism (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1986), 26. 423 See Vanessa Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2020.
424 John Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico: 1976–1998,” History of Photography 22, no. 4, (1998): 317. 425 Self-reflexivity in anthropology can be explained in part by the appearance of new or previously unheard voices
which caused a reckoning within the discipline. These included Native peoples’ independence movements; the
collapse of colonial infrastructure which forced anthropologists to renegotiate access on more thoughtful terms; an
increase in personal involvement by ethnographers with their subjects; the recent arrival of working- and middleclass PhD students; the jarring awareness of multiple, conflicting field studies of the same culture; Marxist critiques
of anthropology; and the new awareness of the complexities of culture after Americans ethnographers began
studying their own cultures. See Paul Henley, Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
426 Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History Volume I (London: Phaidon, 2004), 9. Ibid 10.

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publication.427 In photojournalism, the subject is more important than the author, while in
documentary photography, the author is at least as important as the subject -- which is why
documentary photographers are often called “artists,” even if their art is a distinctly outwardfacing one.428 As Rosler acknowledges, many photographers fulfill both roles. This is all to say
that “New Documentary” would have probably been a better name for the movement.
At least within the US and Western European photography arenas, New Photojournalism
was to a remarkable degree linked to Magnum. Abigail Heyman’s Growing Up Female: A
Personal Photo-Journal (1974) is a second-wave feminist critique of life under patriarchy
consisting of photographs of women and facsimiles of their handwritten, diaristic accounts.
(Figure 3.37) Charles Harbutt’s Travelog (1974) sprang from Harbutt’s increasing
disenchantment with his role as witness to public events, and features often ambiguous and
highly personal images from his own life. (Figure 3.38) “In the early ’70s, I started questioning
this reportage for myself,” he wrote.
A host of manipulators had so corrupted and warped public events, I could no
longer trust the authenticity of what I was seeing. I realized that I was more
interested in pajamas on a bed one Brooklyn morning, or a Dublin woman hauling
groceries to her house, than I was in the machinations of politics and history ‘writ
large.’429
427 Martha Rosler, “Post Documentary, Post Photography?” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975-
2001 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 225. 428 Martha Rosler, cited in Adam D. Weinberg, On the Line: The New Color Photojournalism (Minneapolis: Walker
Art Center, 1986), 31.
429 Sam Roberts, “Charles Harbutt, Photojournalist With an Eye for Art, Dies at 79,” New York Times, July 2, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/arts/charles-harbutt-photojournalist-with-an-eye-for-art-as-well-as-news-diesat-79.html

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Susan Meiselas’ Nicaragua (1981) consists of photos taken between 1978 and 1979 of the
Sandinista Revolution which are notable for their vivid color, open-ended and ambiguous
meaning, and supposedly “artistic” lack of captions.430 (Figure 3.39)
Of these, Gilles Peress’ Telex Iran (1983), made from images shot during the Iranian
Revolution in 1979 and 1980, is perhaps the most relevant here. Peress studied under Foucault
but became disillusioned with academia’s inward, hermetic turn after the Left’s defeat in 1968.
He took up photography in 1970, and, incredibly, was admitted to Magnum the following year.
Unlike many of the postmodernists he left behind, Peress saw the medium’s potential to be both
subjective and objective. He is engaged by his project -- we sense his growing distaste for the
hard-line clerics -- but is also at times mystified. The pictures in Telex Iran have jittery, lopsided
compositions; they convey the feeling of meaning half-uncovered. (Figure 3.40) Someone on a
city street gives the camera a striking look -- is it an index of the day’s events, or just a sundazzled glare? Next to the photographs are not AP-style captions but rather copies of the telexes
(predecessors to faxes) sent back and forth between Peress and Magnum staff detailing various
publication opportunities, requests for film, and the like. These textual details reveal very little
about Iran, but a lot about the mechanics of journalism. In fact, as one photo of a New York City
newsstand full of hysterical Post tabloids demonstrates, Peress sees the project as being about
epistemology, and more specifically, what seems like at times an unbridgeable knowledge gap
between the US and Iran.431 (Figure 3.41)
430 Andy Grundberg argues that this book inaugurated the movement of New Photojournalism, although I clearly
disagree. See Andy Grundberg, “Photojournalism Lays Claim To The Realm Of Esthetics,” New York Times, April
12, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/12/arts/art-photojournalism-lays-claim-to-the-realm-of-esthetics.html. 431 See Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010.

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Around the same time, there existed another unbridgeable knowledge gap, although much
closer to home.
Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means
Manhattan. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. If the other boroughs
exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke -- Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban
limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.432
So begins music journalist Nik Cohn’s 1976 article in New York entitled “Tribal Rites of the
New Saturday Night.”433 (Figure 3.42) And it was this knowledge gap that permitted Cohn to
slip by his editors a highly entertaining -- and entirely fabricated -- account of the Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn disco scene. As Caroline Miller, a later editor of the magazine, explained in an
interview,
…‘70s [era] Brooklyn was a foreign country to most New York magazine editors.
It wasn’t cool, and some of them had probably never been there – even to Brooklyn
Heights, which was Norman Mailer territory. So they may not have had good radar
for credibility.434
Even if Cohn’s editors had known more about the Brooklyn disco scene, Cohn -- who came
clean in a 1997 follow-up article in New York435 -- doubts they would have killed the story:
Many magazine writers used fictional techniques to tell supposedly factual stories.
No end of liberties were taken. Few editors asked tough questions. For the most
part it was a case of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. Magazine writing then was basically a
boys’ club. There was a lot of wretched excess. Along with some great writing came
reams of self-indulgent bollocks.436
When Cohn butted up against the limits of his own knowledge (“I made a lousy interviewer. I
knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn’t speak the language,”) he
432 Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” New York, June 7, 1976, 31. 433 Cohn’s article became the basis of the massively successful film “Saturday Night Fever.” (1977) 434 Humorously, the author forgets to even mention the borough of Staten Island. Nadia Khomami, “Disco's
Saturday Night Fiction,” Guardian, June 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/26/lie-heart-disconik-cohn-tribal-rites-saturday-night-fever 435 See Nik Cohn, “Saturday Night’s Big Bang,” New York, December 8, 1997. 436 Nadia Khomami, “Disco's Saturday Night Fiction,” Guardian, June 26, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/26/lie-heart-disco-nik-cohn-tribal-rites-saturday-night-fever

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made something up.437 When Gilles Peress came up against the limits of his own knowledge, he
acknowledged it -- even made art out of it -- and tried to improve.
Without institutional and disciplinary rules, the veracity of a document hinges on the
integrity of its maker. Furthermore, as Max Kozloff notes, with New Photojournalism “the
resulting gain in pictorial emphasis and impact is offset by the danger that the historical realities
depicted may be processed as merely a phase in some photographer’s career.”438 The
photograph, in other words, may wind up containing too much of the photographer, and not
enough of the purported subject.
John Szarkowski had included one of the Brooklyn Gang photographs in the 1978
MoMA photography exhibition, “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960.”
(Figure 3.43) Despite the binary opposition implied by the title, the curator in fact envisioned a
spectrum existing between the poles of self-expression (as exemplified in the exhibition by
Minor White) and documentation (as exemplified by Robert Frank.)439 And it is somewhere in
the middle of that spectrum that we can locate Davidson’s work. Davidson concretized the idea
behind that title in a (very rare) photo-composite he made. He overlaid a self-portrait onto an
interior scene from the East 100th Street project. (Figure 3.44) The result is literally somewhere
between a mirror (reflecting his face) and a window (showing the room beyond), and with it,
Davidson affirms his camera’s double indexicality -- its ability to index both subject and
object.440
437 Cohn, “Saturday Night’s Big Bang,” 34. 438 Max Kozloff, Lone Visions, Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1994), 184.
439 John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1978), 18-19. 440 Unfortunately, I could not find more information about the photograph, such as the intentions of its maker or its
publication history.

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In technique and expressiveness, Davidson’s photographs diverged sharply from the
other canonical American subway photographer, Walker Evans. Over three times in 1938, 1940,
and 1941, Evans descended into the subway with a 35mm camera hidden under his jacket, with a
long shutter release cord snaking down his sleeve and into his palm.441 (Figures 3.45-3.47)
Unlike Davidson, who asked permission to photograph whenever possible and announced
himself with a flash, Evans quietly shifted his upper body to “aim” and then pushed a button. As
an act of what he called “angry protest” against studio portraiture, Evans hoped to come away
with truly unposed portraits -- objective records free of a photographer’s biased and fallible
presence.442
I would like to be able to state flatly that sixty-two people came unconsciously into
range before an impersonal fixed recording machine during a certain time period,
and that all these individuals who came into the film frame were photographed, and
photographed without any human selection for the moment of lens exposure.443
Notes available in Evans’ archive show that he hoped to bring a kind of anthropological
detachment to his project.444 Ultimately, however, he acknowledged that he failed to erase all
traces of human touch from the photos -- after all, it was Evans who decided when and where to
point and shoot the camera, and which frames to print and not print. Ultimately, he came to
believe he had merely achieved the “look” of objective portraits rather than the reality. To the socalled New Photojournalists, Davidson’s highly visible presence, vividly personal writing, and
clearly manipulated photographs would have felt like the more ethical route.
441 Svetlana Alpers, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 158. 442 Jeffrey W. Limerick, “An Interview with Walker Evans, Old Lyme, Connecticut, May 20, 1973,” with comments
by Patricia L. Nelson (unpublished).
443 Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 160. 444 Evans commented: “The New York subway pictures are a fling in native American contemporary anthropology.
With something of the anthropologist’s approach, I tried to survey and record the New York subway inhabitants as
though I were examining another period and another civilization.” See “Subway,” typescript [for Reyna Weisl at
Bazaar], Folder 23, Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Mailer’s Hipster
Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” published in the Fall 1957 issue of Dissent,
may provide a clue as to why this kind of highly subjective documentary photography appealed
to Davidson at a time when news agencies such as the Associated Press and United Press
International prioritized information over aesthetic self-expression. Written at the height of the
Beat era, “The White Negro” was Mailer’s attempt at defining and locating the origins of the
hipster. To Mailer, it was in part a response to the horror of the still-recent war. Anyone with a
newspaper subscription in Mailer’s time would have known on some level that, with the roll of
the cosmic dice, they might perish at any moment, that:
We might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in
which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself
would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow
with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather
a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.445
If instant death by bomb, slower death in a camp, or “slow death by conformity with every
creative and rebellious instinct stifled” is all but assured, the hipster believes they must
renegotiate the terms by which they live. In such circumstances, it is imperative “to divorce
oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the
rebellious imperatives of the self.”446 [emphasis mine] The alternative to burrowing inwards is to
be “jailed in the prison air of other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet
desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage.”447 Black Americans, Mailer writes, also endure
the quiet terror of nuclear war, but unlike whites, live with the very clear and present danger of
racist violence. Thus, black people (writ large) are, in Mailer’s argument, the ideal model for the
445 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” Dissent, Fall 1957, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/thewhite-negro-fall-1957. 446 Ibid. 447 Ibid.

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hipster. (He fails to consider how class might intersect with race. Neither violence, nor black
Americans’ supposed reaction, “relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory
pleasures of the body,” are experienced equally across the black community. But perhaps white
perceptions of black America are more important to Mailer’s argument than the social realities of
black life.)448 The comparison between Mailer’s hipster and Davidson is imperfect; Davidson
was a devoted husband and father who lived in a large apartment on the Upper West Side, not a
solitary, train-hopping poet. But his inability to survive the confines of Eastman Kodak, Yale,
Life, Vogue, and even Magnum -- he threatened to quit on April 17, 1963 -- as well as his
repeated, torch-lit explorations of the corridors of the Self all suggest something of the hipster.449
Davidson Rediscovers Judaism
I believe Davidson’s Subway project makes an audacious – and insupportable --
comparison between the city’s transit system and the experience of the Holocaust. First, I want to
show why that traumatic historical episode might have been close at hand at this moment as he
was trying to make sense of what he found underground. Simply ascribing it to his identity as a
Jewish person is inadequate; after all, being American does not necessarily endow one with
knowledge of, for example, slavery. Whether the explanations I give take the form of broad,
national trends, or minute, personal circumstances, they are historical and not essentializing. One
could easily imagine Subway never having come into existence if just a few of these details had
been different.
448 Ibid. 449 Davidson to the Executive Committee of Magnum Photos, April 17, 1963, Magnum Foundation, MF010-004-
001.

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Although Davidson grew up in an assimilated, non-practicing Jewish family, in the years
leading up to the Subway project, he had begun rediscovering his Jewish roots.450 Yet even
before he made this choice, Jewish precarity and rejuvenation would have been evident to him if
he had been interested in finding it. Davidson’s maternal grandfather Max Simon had emigrated
to the US from Russia-Poland a few decades before the war obliterated the Jewish presence in
Poland, reducing it from three million in 1933 to forty-five thousand in 1950, and effectively
cutting his family tree at the roots.451 Davidson attended Yale while the university still
maintained an informal Jewish quota.452 He spent a year of his military service stationed in
Rocquencourt, France, just over twenty miles from Drancy, which was Occupied France’s
primary train deportation site for sending Jews to the death camps.453 His repeated photographic
trips to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, begun in 1957 and going to at least 2004, trace the decline
of the neighborhood’s Jewish population. Consider these two photos, the first from 1957 and the
second from 1990. A boy and girl “play house” on the street with a doll in a wooden crate, in a
scene which seems to promise renewal and plenitude, just like the “spring” next to them, shown
here in the guise of a fire hydrant. (Figure 3.48) Years later, two brothers, both respected rabbis,
pose against a battered fence, appearing wise, and old enough to have read the Torah in its first
draft. (Figure 3.49)
Indeed, as Davidson came to see firsthand, the Jewish history of New York City in this
period was not an easy one. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, 100,000 Jewish people left the city --
450 Bruce Davidson, Subway (New York: Aperture, 2011), 9. 451 Goldberg, 12. “Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
accessed July 7, 2023, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/remaining-jewish-population-of-europe-in1945.
452 See Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 453 Seventy-thousand prisoners passed through Drancy between August 1941 and August 1944. “Drancy,” United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed July 7, 2023,
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/drancy.

106
the Bronx lost the most -- for nearby suburbs, making Jews for the first time as equally
“suburbanized” as the rest of the US population.454 All too often, though, it was the younger,
upwardly mobile generation that got out, leaving behind their elderly in the dying city -- a
painful trend that went unexamined until journalists brought it to light in the 1970s.455 By 1974,
there were 111,000 poor elderly Jewish people in the city.456 Many were too old to work, or had
lost their blue-collar jobs as the city’s manufacturing base evaporated.457 In addition to health
problems, bad housing, and loneliness, this population also contended with the loss of
synagogues and kosher butcher stores, and levels of crime that turned many elderly people into
prisoners in their own homes.458 This generation, often consisting of Holocaust survivors, lived
in an uneasy peace with their poor Latino and African-American neighbors, or in other cases,
joined Italians in resisting the bussing of black children into their neighborhoods.459
454 Ibid 155. 455 See for example James M. Markham, “Old and Alone in a Big City,” New York Times, December 31, 1971,
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/31/archives/old-and-alone-in-a-big-city-old-and-alone-what-its-like-forwidow.html.
456 Martin Hochbaum and Naomi B. Levine, “Introduction,” in Poor Jews: An American Awakening, ed. Martin
Hochbaum and Naomi B. Levine (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974), 3.
457 Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010 (New York: New York
University Press, 2012), 165.
458 Hochbaum and Levine, 4. 459 Gurock, 157. At the same time, American Judaism experienced a hopeful religious reawakening. Jonathan D.
Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 324. Synagogue service exchanged
decorum and solemnity for a family-like intimacy. Worshippers were permitted to wear much less formal clothing,
and they were encouraged to participate instead of passively observe. Ibid. Praying aloud, singing, and dancing
became common sights. Ibid. Sermons turned into discussions; organ music was swapped out for pianos and guitars.
Ibid. Changes in this strand of Judaism went deeper than mere window-dressing; the decades-long emphasis on
social action shifted to an emphasis on personal and spiritual growth. Ibid 328. Focusing on the individual (the
“sovereign self,”) [emphasis mine] the new believer saw the life of faith as an ongoing quest in which they would
develop and challenge their own understandings. Ibid 328. And they could pick and choose which elements of the
diverse faith to embrace, based on personal preference. Ibid. (A concurrent trend saw Reform Jews returning to
certain practices they had once shunned, from wearing head coverings and shawls in temple, to following Jewish
dietary laws, leaving many Orthodox Jews with a great sense of vindication.) Ibid 325-326.

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Isaac Bashevis Singer
Davidson experienced something close to home that firmly established or at least
affirmed his cultural reawakening. He met Isaac Bashevis Singer at a photo shoot in the writer’s
Upper West Side apartment in 1965.460 (Figure 3.50) This future Nobel Prize-winning novelist
and journalist wrote primarily in Yiddish and evoked the Jewish worlds of pre-war Poland and
post-war New York City.461 After Davidson married Emily Haas (no relation to Davidson’s
mentor Ernst Haas) in 1967, the couple found a larger apartment, coincidentally, in the same
building as Singer.462 They became acquainted, and Davidson began reading Singer’s work in
translation, an experience which gave him “a sense of [his] own lost heritage.”
When Davidson received a grant from the American Film Institute in 1972 to make a
documentary about an American writer of his choice for public television, he chose Singer (who,
although born in Russia-Poland, had become a US citizen in 1943.)463 “I wanted to work in
fiction,” Davidson wrote, “but I had been given the grant money to make a documentary. To
disguise the fact that I was filming fiction, I integrated one of Singer's short stories into a film
about him. Singer was the subject of the documentary and an actor in his short story.”464 It was
Davidson’s boldest foray to date beyond the bounds of documentary. Singer’s short story “The
Beard” was the basis for what would become “Isaac Singer's Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko's
Beard,” which was distributed to schools around the country, and which won first prize in fiction
at the American Film Festival the following year.465 (Figure 3.51)
460 Jill Meredith, “Bruce Davidson’s Lower East Side,” in Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press and Mead Art Museum, 2004), 14.
461 Yiddish may not have been rare in New York City, but it was rare in the list of Nobel Prize-winners. “Isaac
Bashevis Singer,” Britannica, accessed July 9, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Bashevis-Singer 462 Alex Haas, email to author, June 27, 2023. Kroemer, 309. 463 Davidson, “Introduction,” 13. “Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Britannica, accessed July 9, 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Bashevis-Singer 464 Davidson, “Introduction,” 13. 465 Ibid.

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Singer’s son Israel Zamir recalled the real-life encounter which had inspired the short
fictional story:
One day when we were in a cafeteria on Broadway. Sitting at one of the tables in
the corner was a woman in her sixties with a long white beard, smoking a cigar.
Neither my father nor I could take our eyes off her. 'I sense that she's got a
fascinating story,' he whispered to me…He moved to her table and ended up talking
with her for hours. Not long after that encounter, his story ‘The Beard’ came out.466
Singer changed certain details for the setup of the short story, while remaining, in a sense,
true to life.467 The opening scene is still in the cafeteria (presumably the Garden Cafeteria, which
once sat at the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street in the Lower East Side, and which
Singer would frequent when he worked down the street as a journalist at the Jewish Daily
Forward.
468) But instead of dining with Singer’s real-life son, the narrator is eating with a group
of fellow writers (in fact a common occurrence for Singer, who later wrote, “I ate there and
discussed literature with my literary chums, gossiped about publishers, editors and especially the
critics who didn't like us and whom we disliked.”)469 It is here the story veers into the
imaginative, while maintaining the same lucid descriptive power and utter plausibility. It thus
points to another sympathetic connection between Davidson’s photography and Singer’s writing
-- and suggests another reason why Singer’s work had a powerful effect on the photographer.
The narrator and his friends marvel at the fortunes of a fellow writer: “that a Yiddish
writer should become rich, and in his old age to boot, seemed unbelievable. But it happened to
466 Israel Zamir, Journey to My Father: Isaac Bashevis Singer, (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995), 46. 467 Late in life, Singer reminisced, “I have created a literature which is half autobiography and half fiction. I began to
mix fiction with reality to such a degree that I was bewildered myself, I didn’t know what is really autobiography
and what is fiction.” See Amram Nowak, “Isaac in America: A Journey with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” July 6, 1987,
PBS, 56:20. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/isaac-bashevis-singer-about-isaac-bashevis-singer/706. 468 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Introduction to the Garden Cafeteria portfolio by Bruce Davidson,” [1973] in Isaac
Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press and Mead Art Museum, 2004),
1.
469 Ibid.

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Bendit Pupko.”470 (Pupko’s money came not from his writing, which went unread, but from
taking some spectacularly successful investment advice from a mysterious relative.) The friends
are bemused at how little Pupko’s lifestyle has changed. Singer’s description is priceless: “he
wore the same shabby clothes he always wore. He sat with us at the table, smoked cigarettes,
coughed, ate rice pudding, and complained. ‘What can I do with my money?’” Pupko asks, while
living in a city invented for spending money, “‘Nothing.’”471 In fact, description is all the
narrator, or anyone else for that matter, seems capable of in “The Beard.” As an author, Pupko
seemed to accumulate descriptions; he “described half-crazed people, chronic misers, old
country quarrels which had gone on for so many years that no one knew how they began or what
they were about…His paragraphs went on for pages.”472 Later, the narrator describes Pupko’s
wife’s “bushy brows” and “dark eyes, almost all pupil: ‘I thought the witches who flew on
brooms to attend Black Mass on Saturday nights and were later burned at the stake must have
looked like this.’”473 (Singer once argued that “good literature, like good journalism, strives to
provide facts without superfluous interpretation…It is a fact, for example, that Dostoevsky never
made clear why Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, decided to commit murder.”474)
Explanation is, at least in this story, not possible. The narrator skeptically recalls the time when
“Pupko learned about Freud for the first time, and he tried to explain his characters according to
Freudian theory.”475 Magazine criticism -- an act of explanation, among other things -- is
revealed to be compromised, after Pupko successfully bribes a respected critic to write a positive
470 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Beard,” in A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1981), 276.
471 Ibid. 472 Ibid 277. 473 Ibid 282. 474 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Journalism and Literature,” in Old Truths and New Cliches, ed. David Stromberg
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 22.
475 Singer, “The Beard,” 282.

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review. “In my circle I learned long ago never to look for explanations,” the narrator tells us,
before sharing some inexplicable anecdotes he has collected: “a comedian of the Yiddish theater
who was known for his salty language suddenly became religious, let his side-locks grow, and
settled down in Jerusalem in the Mea Shearim quarter, where the most zealous Jews lived…”476
The rule proves durable when, a few pages later, the narrator tries, and fails, to find explanations
himself. He asks Pupko’s wife why Pupko had fallen in love with his wife’s beard, insisting that
she keep it. “He must have homosexual inclinations,” the narrator proposes. “Oh, I knew you'd
say that,” Mrs. Pupko replies dismissively. “That is what everyone said. From you I expected
something more original. He's not a homosexual. People have idiosyncrasies which can't be
explained by any theories.”477
A well-known photographer living in New York City would have had many opportunities
to meet many different writers. But perhaps Davidson found a kindred spirit in Singer, whose
career path -- journalist to fiction writer -- and short story “The Beard” -- both started with fact
and veered into the imagined, just as Davidson’s photography projects often sprang from news
stories before reimagining his subject in highly personal terms. And perhaps Singer’s argument
about description versus explanation rang true to Davidson, whose own medium famously excels
at description and fails at explanation.478
The film finished, Davidson could not resist returning to the Lower East Side. He met
and photographed an old scribe who had survived the camps and who now repaired ragged Torah
476 Ibid 278. 477 Ibid 283. 478 A year after Davidson made his film, Susan Sontag would write about this conundrum in an essay for the New
York Review of Books: “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to
deduction, speculation, and fantasy. In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks,
understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time.
Only that which narrates can make us understand.” See Susan Sontag, “Photography” New York Review of Books,
October 18, 1973, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/10/18/photography/.

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scrolls.479 Davidson also returned to the Garden Cafeteria, but this time with a still camera. The
results would be published in the October 15, 1973 issue of New York magazine (Figure 3.52-
3.55) “There, like remnants of a past age,” Davidson writes of the diners he saw, “they sat alone
at tables along the wall or in small groups at the larger tables.”480 Some were Holocaust
survivors, while others had come to the US before the war; still others had lived in the
neighborhood their whole lives. In a related but unpublished description of the patrons, Singer
seems both charmed and appalled:
Although they were all poor and wore shabby clothes, they were rich in
individuality. Every one of them complained about the misery of life in New York
in his own style. They were unique in every possible manner. I consider myself
lucky that [Davidson] took also a picture of me among all these human remnants. I
was just as poor as they were -- sometimes as disgusted with life.481
Trying to find a way in, Davidson had a dawning realization of the weight some of these
people were carrying: “how does one begin a conversation with somebody who may have lost all
his family in the Nazi camps?”482 Bessie Gakaubowicz was once such person. (Figure 3.56) “In
1941 my husband was the first,” she told him. “My son, 1943. In the streets they catch them like
dogs…My husband had twelve brothers. No more.”483 She was on the way to a death camp
herself when the Underground sabotaged the train, allowing many to escape.484 She holds up a
worn photograph of her and her husband shortly before he was sent to the camp; in it, she
appears placid, her husband eager and devoted. Gakaubowicz’s face in the present day looks like
the Earth seen from a great distance: sheets of stone crumpled under tectonic stress, great alluvial
plains, and dark, unfathomable sinkholes.
479 Davidson, Subway, 9. 480 Davidson, “Introduction,” 14. 481 Singer, “Introduction to the Garden Cafeteria portfolio by Bruce Davidson,” 1. 482 Bruce Davidson, "The Cafeteria," New York, October 15, 1973, 40. 483 Ibid 45. 484 Ibid.

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The portrait of Gakaubowicz demonstrates Davidson’s answer to a difficult question:
how to take a photo in the utterly ordinary surroundings of a cheap diner that might have gravitas
worthy of its subject? The woman appears perfectly lit in the photograph, but the background to
the right is much darker than it would have appeared to the customers, while the area to the left is
just inky blackness. Davidson accomplished this by using a very fast shutter speed to
dramatically cut the amount of illumination coming into the camera from the overhead lights and
windows. He then replaced some of that light with his own, from a strobe held just to the left of
the camera, pointed at the subject.485
To the naked eye, the scene would probably have appeared fairly flat. (With no major
variation in illumination, the brain misses an important data point with which to create a threedimensional mental image of a given scene.486 In these cases, the mind must lean on the lessreliable clues of linear perspective, occlusion, binocularity, and its knowledge of the common
size of objects.487) But Davidson’s technique creates enormous value contrast in the print, thus
isolating Gakaubowicz from the diner around her. With eyes half-closed, she even seems isolated
from the person taking her picture -- indeed, given Davidson’s explosive flash, she was without a
doubt blinded to him in the moment.488 She is, paradoxically, both revealed by the probing light,
and totally inaccessible. Deflected by this gesture from a woman seemingly lost in loss,
Davidson’s imagination goes elsewhere.
Another photograph shows a man and woman, perhaps in their sixties, finishing their
meal. (Figure 3.57) Their worn expressions speak of difficult lives. Scattered before them are
485 If the background light decreased with the faster shutter speed, why would the flash light not do the same?
Because there is not a camera shutter on Earth that can intercept flash light once it is out of the gates. Instead, the
photographer controls the strength of the flash by opening or closing the aperture of the lens. 486 Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, The Visual World of Shadows (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 84. 487 Huxlin, 634. 488 Flint, 10.

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food-smeared plates, saucers, coffee cups, a grapefruit, a bagel -- circular objects which appear
in this jumbled state as a series of off-kilter ellipses. Floating above them in the middle distance
are overhead lightbulbs suspended in perfectly spherical frosted globes, arranged in a line
drawing the eye to the back of the diner, and in a cluster above the woman’s head. “I…imagined
the globes in the ceiling,” Davidson later wrote, “to be like distant suns, planets, or moons,
giving a sense of outer space and the inevitable void.”489 In drawing our eye from the bottom of
the photograph to the top, from the grubby and irregular to the fantastical and arranged, we
simultaneously trace the path of Davidson’s creative process.
Fueled by the success of his first Isaac Bashhevis Singer adaption, Davidson tried to
make a feature-length film based on Singer’s novel Enemies, a Love Story.
490 The tragicomedy
follows Herman Broder, a Jewish man who had survived World War II by hiding in a hayloft for
three years. By the late 1940s, he is living in Coney Island, Brooklyn attempting to juggle
relationships with three women by spinning more and more lies. For these characters, the
Holocaust is ever-present. Herman daydreams that the Nazis had won and taken over New York.
To stay safe, he hides in the bathroom and has his wife brick up the doorway.491 His mistress
Masha yells at her mother for her endless grieving, “but when her mother was silent, Masha
would take over.”492 And yet for all their ceaseless rumination and mourning, the characters
know that the dark heart of the Holocaust is essentially unspeakable. “From his own experience
with Masha and other survivors of the German camps,” Herman muses, “he knew that the whole
489 Davidson, Outside Inside: 1966-2009, 54. 490 The novel was first published in The Jewish Daily Forward in 1966 under the title “Sonim, di Geshichte fun a
Liebe,” and translated into English in 1972. Paul Mazursky directed a cinematic version released in 1989 which
Janet Maslin of the Times described as a “deeply felt, fiercely evocative adaptation.” She noted that the street and
subway scenes were “given a vibrant glow by Fred Murphy's cinematography.” See Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies,
a Love Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Janet Maslin, “Tale of Hope and Fatalism By Isaac
Bashevis Singer,” New York Times, December 13, 1989, C22. 491 Singer, Enemies, a Love Story, 9. 492 Ibid 43.

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truth would never be learned from those who had survived the concentration camps…not
because they lied but because it was impossible for them to tell it all.”493
One way Herman -- who, like Singer and Davidson, had been spared contact with the
Third Reich -- attempts to understand is by analogy to, of all things, New York City mass
transit.494 “Herman went up the stairs to the El, and a train soon arrived,” Singer writes. “When
the doors opened, he felt a blast of heat.” One could read this as an extremely abbreviated
description of a Sonderkommando’s daily duties.495 Sonderkommandos were male prisoners,
mostly Jewish, who performed, under threat of death, the ungodly manual labor of the death
camps -- watching trains unload passengers, guiding them to the gas chambers, removing dead
bodies from those chambers, and placing bodies into ovens (“he felt a blast of heat.”)496 At
another point in Singer’s novel, Herman momentarily maps the scene greeting new arrivals to the
camp onto New York City: “the doors of the train opened and shut. Herman looked up each time.
No doubt there were Nazis roaming about New York.”497 In the most explicit comparison yet,
Singer evokes the experience of Jews packed into train cars headed for the camps:
When he reached a station, he went down the steps to the subway. Such heat and
humidity! …Women whose dresses were wet under the armpits jostled each other
with their packages and purses, their eyes glinting in fury…On the platform, a dense
crowd was waiting, bodies pushed against one another…The crowd on the platform
493 Ibid 71. 494 As tenuous a link as this may seem at first, Singer presumably saw that trains were both emblematic of New York
City, and of crucial importance to the Nazi project as well. Following Poland’s defeat, Adolf Eichmann directed
railroads to relocate the country’s enormous Jewish population to ghettos in cities such as Warsaw. Railroad
officials also assisted in Nazi social engineering, moving ethnic German settlers into newly conquered territories.
They coordinated the movement of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war into slave labor camps, and, from 1942
onwards, into death camps. Trains transported goods stolen from Jews and even the hair of murdered Jewish
women. Overall, about half of the Jews who were killed by Nazis were carried to their deaths by the Reichsbahn.
See Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway
Volume 2, 1933-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 114-127. 495 The July 1942 invention of the Sonderkommando squads was, in Primo Levi’s words, “National Socialism’s most
demonic crime.” Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Rooks 1989),
52.
496 Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, trans. S. Flatauer (New York: Stein and
Day, 1979) 191-202. 497 Singer, Enemies, a Love Story, 19.

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lurched toward the opening doors before the passengers inside could make their
way out. An irresistible force shoved Herman into the car. Hips, breasts, elbows
pressed against him. Here, at least, the illusion of free will had vanished. Here man
was tossed about like a pebble or like a meteor in space… Jews must have been
packed together like this in the freight cars that carried them to the gas chambers.
Herman shut his eyes.498 [emphasis mine]
Davidson spent two years trying to make a feature-length film based on Singer’s novel:
obtaining rights, working on a script, looking for actors -- but the money never materialized.499
He fell into a depression. “In an effort to re-root myself,” Davidson later wrote, “I visited some
of my favorite city haunts, [like] the Lower East Side, the Bronx Zoo, and Coney Island. In
taking the subway to these places I began to see the subway itself as a relevant subject.”500 His
mood fouled, Davidson morbidly surveyed the scene, selecting elements, suppressing others,
testing the resulting configurations against schemas he already held. Although it escaped the
attention of critics from the time of Subway’s publication, I believe Davidson found a tantalizing
metaphor laid out in Singer’s book, one that he would then attempt to realize in his photographs
taken underground.
History of the Subway
No matter how unbridgeable the chasm was that existed between abyssal 1940s Poland
and merely sordid 1970s New York -- historically, morally, epidemiologically -- a major
depressive episode in a subject who was immersed in Holocaust literature, a community of
Holocaust survivors, and the fetid environment of the New York City subway may well have
papered over the difference. The subway was in particularly poor shape during the years covered
498 Ibid 88-89. 499 Davidson, “Introduction,” 14. 500 Davidson, Outside Inside: 1966-2009, 354.

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in this dissertation, and could have been fertile ground for such a dark harvest. But, in truth, mass
transit in New York was widely disliked from its earliest days.501
Abraham Bower was the first person to bring mass transit to New York City, in the form
of a twelve-seat stagecoach named “Accommodation,” which jostled its passengers over the
cobblestones of Broadway in the late 1820s. A business associate of Bower’s named John
Stephenson invented the much smoother-riding “horse railway” by simply having horses pull a
streetcar on metal rails. (Figure 3.58) Originally intended to be a steam-powered railroad, it ran
along the Bowery from Prince to Fourteenth Streets. These inventions and others like them
helped workers live further and further away from their places of employment -- introducing the
concept of the commute to New Yorkers -- and in turn altered the terrain and ecology of the
island of Manhattan. They also sped up the pace of urban life, and clogged the north-south
avenues with an often dangerous level of traffic.502 “Modern martyrdom may be succinctly
defined as riding in a New York omnibus,” wrote the New York Herald.
503 A passenger may
well get shoved, jostled, and pickpocketed, only to discover that the last remaining available seat
is one “upon which millions of passengers have sat, and which [is] saturated with their
maleficent emanations.”504 A drawing in Harper’s Illustrated Weekly portrayed the experience as
positively Dante-esque. (Figure 3.59) “All Hope Abandon Ye Who Enter Here,” reads a sign at
the entrance to the carriage. Two females enter under the lecherous gazes of the assembled
rogues already inside, another sign above their heads reading “Pickpockets Paradise.”
501 Michael Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1997), 1.
502 Sunny Stalter-Pace, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (Boston:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 10-11. 503 “Metropolitan Conveyances - the Omnibus Situation,” New York Herald, October 2, 1864, 4. 504 “The City Cars,” New York Times, May 31, 1866, 4.

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It became obvious that a different system was needed, but which one, no one knew. The
first proposals for elevated railroads appeared in the 1840s, and by 1854, Scientific American
could write, “it is difficult for us to remember all the plans which have been presented to us for
elevated railroads on Broadway during the past eight years.” Ideas for underground railroads
came more slowly; by 1867, the government was weighing just three different subway plans, and
over forty different elevated plans. A long list of considerations created endless debate and delay.
Should they build on Broadway and anger business owners with construction noise, or build in
residential areas and anger homeowners? Should they run the elevated rail over the sidewalk or
over the street? How should a passenger get from the sidewalk to the platform, and then from the
platform onto the train? Should the train be powered by horses or steam?505 None of this was
obvious at the time. (In case one feels tempted to smirk at their quandary, one must remember
that the subway system New Yorkers have now is no sleek and silent tube, but a patchwork and a
palimpsest of countless false starts, technological spiderwebs, and ad hoc solutions.) The press
covered the various proposals extensively (in fact, it was the press which produced the large
majority of images of early public transit in New York, until a flurry of artistic activity in the
1920s changed that.)506 A drawing in Gleason’s Drawing Room Companion from 1854 shows
pedestrians and horse railways traveling on a platform elevated over the city street. (Figure 3.60)
Ironically, the fundamental concept behind this very early idea would eventually win out, and
would mark the island of Manhattan until 1955 -- but in the meantime, inventors kept on
churning out new plans.507 In 1871, Dr. Rufus H. Gilbert proposed what would have been, from
an aesthetic standpoint at least, a far better elevated railroad than the dark and rusted behemoths
505 Brooks, 10. 506 Ibid 5. 507 Ibid 33.

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which, to this day, glower down at pedestrians in certain parts of the outer boroughs. (Figure
3.61) Consisting of two slim train tubes elevated high above the city street on ornamental, lacelike flying buttresses, his “Covered Atmospheric Railway” would have allowed much more light
into the canyons below. It was Alfred Speer, though, who proposed what would have surely been
the most splendiferous public transit system in the world. (Figure 3.62) “Speer’s Endless
Railway Train,” shown in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1874, would have consisted
of a massive moving sidewalk, featuring park benches, lampposts, and covered shelter which
traveled for block after block over the sidewalk before crossing the street and returning. The
opportunities for urban spectatorship would have been extraordinary. On any given day, one
might have been able to watch clerks toil away through their second story window, or romantic
overtures on street corners, or pickpockets in action, or any number of other human endeavors,
both great and small. By placing users in motion and close to the street -- but not in its dust and
mud -- this railway would have rendered the reality of New York truly spectacular.508
But it was not to be. By the 1880s, Manhattan’s four, quite plain, and very loud elevated
trains were completed. (Figure 3.63) It was more than just the tremendous racket that reached
pedestrians below. An article in Scientific American reported that “chunks of coal, bolts of iron,
hot and cold water, fiery coals…are only a part of the droppings that fall from the rattling trains.”
The trains also produced a fine spray of iron shavings each time the brakes were applied.
“Viewed under the microscope, their dangerous character becomes apparent. The greater part
were bordered by a jagged fringe with very fine points…”509 Doctors began noticing patients
coming in with what must have been extraordinarily unpleasant corneal abrasions.510
508 See chapter one of Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
509 “Elevated City Railways Cause Eye Troubles,” Scientific American 50 (May 17, 1884), 304. 510 Ibid.

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The first proposals for subterranean trains had come earlier, in the 1860s. Most likely
conditioned to expect the worst by the public transit in existence, New Yorkers were already
imagining the subway as an infernal space before it was even completed. In 1900, Chief
Engineer William Barclay Parson lamented that “underground railways have always been
associated in the public mind with dark, damp, dank, smoke-laden tunnels -- veritable
approaches to the lower regions.”511 Several years after the 1904 opening of the subway, the
Ashcan School painter John Sloan drew a disquieting scene of subway laborers entering the
underground job site, shovels in hand. (Figure 3.64) Looming over the entrance stands Death,
dangling an enticing loaf of bread over the doomed workers’ heads, and a tombstone reading,
“Sacred to the (Short) Memory of the Workmen.”512
Opening day drew huge crowds. (Figure 3.65) One hundred and fifty thousand
passengers created what the New York Times called a “carnival” atmosphere.513 But passengers
immediately began complaining. The gaps between platform and train were too wide; there were
too many advertisements; the crowds were overwhelming.514 The Times noted with astonishment
that passengers didn’t choose to ride the line back and forth into the evening, but simply got out
at the stop nearest their homes and left.515
511 “Relief of Broadway and the People of New York -- an Underground Railroad a Necessity,” New York Times,
December 22, 1865, 4.
512 Dark metaphors like this only increased in number over the years. Shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lewis
Mumford wrote about subways being used as bomb shelters: “the underground city threatens…to become the
ultimate burial crypt of our incinerated civilization.” See Lewis Mumford, The City in History: its Origins, its
Transformations, and its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 481. 513 “Our Subway Open, 150,000 Try It,” New York Times, October 28, 1904, 1. 514 Brian J. Cudahy, Under the Sidewalks of New York: the Story of the Greatest Subway System in the World (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1995), 7.
515 The New York Tribune’s description of opening day is almost beyond belief: “indescribable scenes of crowding
and confusion, never before paralleled in this city, marked the throwing open of the subway to the general public last
night. The old 6 o’clock Brooklyn Bridge car crush paled into insignificance when contrasted with the deadly
suffocating, rib-smashing subway rush which began at 7 o’clock tonight. Men fought, kicked and pummeled one
another in the mad desire to reach the subway ticket offices or to ride on the trains. Women were dragged out, either
screaming in hysterics or in a swooning condition; grey haired men pleaded for mercy, boys were knocked down
and only escaped by a miracle from being trampled under foot. The presence of the police alone averted what would

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This was the beginning of the subway. Next, we turn to what, in its own day, felt like the
end. On February 9, 1965, Joseph E. O’Grady, the chairman of the Transit Authority, publicly
announced that robberies, muggings, and assaults with weapons had increased 52.5% in the
city’s subways the previous year -- the largest increase of felonies in the system’s history.516
Such was his concern that O’Grady asked fellow passengers to do the work of the police, and
intervene in active crime scenes.517 Public perception swung decisively a month later, after a 17-
year-old named Andrew Mormile was stabbed to death by one of three unruly teenagers, as
eleven other passengers watched, frozen in their seats.518 The New York Transit Museum
Archive keeps letters of complaint sent by passengers to the Transit Authority, which
collectively attest to the wide range of other offenses New Yorkers endured. Letters from
February 1965 describe other subway users spitting in public, “colored people and Puerto
Ricans” sleeping menacingly on the trains, exhibitionists, and a violent assault which almost cost
a passenger their sight.519 Rising subway crime in 1965 led to the topic being included in the
New York Times’ annual index for the first time.520
Three years later, city officials ordered three hundred new subway cars which promised
quieter, smoother rides, but which instead frequently broke down and occasionally caught fire.
undoubtedly have been panic after panic, with wholesale loss of life.” “Birth of the Subway Crash,” New York
Tribune, October 28, 1904, unpaginated. “Our Subway Open, 150,000 Try It,” 1. 516 Emanuel Perlmutter, “Major Crime Up 52% in Subways and 9% Citywide,” New York Times, February 10, 1965. 517 Ibid. 518 Christopher Lynch, a 210-pound, 6-foot 4-inch 17-year-old entered a subway car with two friends, began
aggressively flirting with some young women, asked other riders for money, and then approached Mormile. Also 17
years old, but 100 pounds lighter than Lynch, Mormile attempted to ignore Lynch. Lynch then drew a knife and
stabbed Mormile several times in the face and neck. The train pulled into the next station, the killer fled, and the
train departed again before any passengers dared to call for help. “Subway Rider Slain; 3 Hold Car in Terror,” New
York Times, March 13, 1965, 1. David Anderson, “Youth Identified As Subway Killer,” New York Times, December
10, 1965, 96.
519 Transit Authority's reply to a complaint made by Mr. Hoffmann, February 2, 1965, New York Transit Museum
Archive. Ellen Reiner to the Transit Authority, February 28, 1965, New York Transit Museum Archive. Marlene
Connor to the Transit Authority, February 19, 1965, New York Transit Museum Archive. Morris W. Watkins to the
mayor and Transit Authority, February 13, 1965, New York Transit Museum Archive.
520 Brooks, 194.

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Replacement cars solved many of these problems, but introduced new ones: they were found to
contain potentially catastrophic cracking in their undercarriages.521 Underneath the hardware
problems was a longer history of underfunding day-to-day train operations and capital
improvements -- a problem exacerbated in the mid-1970s when the MTA began routinely
skimming off funds meant for capital improvement in order to cover deficits in its yearly
budget.522 Struggling through the darkest days of the financial crisis, Mayor Abe Beame
institutionalized this neglect under the bureaucratic euphemism “deferred maintenance.” In 1978,
millions of dollars were taken from maintenance and inspection programs to pay for, incredibly,
a station redecoration program.523 The system, in effect, had not been adequately maintained,
rebuilt, or extended since the early 1950s.524 The cumulative result was a precipitous drop in
performance which lasted for twelve years. In 1981 alone, riders encountered 37,000 canceled
trains, 217 “major” car fires, and 21 train collisions and derailments.525 That same year, the New
York Federal Reserve released a report that estimated that 41 million labor-hours would be lost
per year if the trains were even five minutes behind schedule each day, and 300 million dollars
would be lost if there were just two 25-minute delays per week.526 The subway map itself
seemed to contract like a wounded animal: because of the city’s fiscal crisis, the 1970s were the
only decade in the subway’s history in which the system actually lost routes.527 In response to
rising crime, Curtis Sliwa founded the Guardian Angels, an unauthorized anti-crime patrol, in
521 Roger P. Roess, and Gene Sansone, The Wheels That Drove New York: a History of the New York City Transit
System (New York: Springer, 2013), 342. 522 Stan Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders: Why the MTA Doesn’t Work,” Village Voice, March 17, 1980, 25. 523 Leslie Maitland, “Subway Inspections Cut for Redecoration, Report Says,” New York Times, June 27, 1979, B3. 524 Pinkwas, 25. 525 Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), 135.
526 Daniel D. Chall, “The Economic Costs of Subway Deterioration,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Quarterly
Review (Spring 1981): 8–14. 527 The affected routes were the Third Avenue Elevated in the Bronx, April 29, 1973; Culver Shuttle, May 11, 1975;
Bowling Green-South Ferry Shuttle, February 13, 1977; and the Jamaica Elevated between Queens Blvd and 168th
Street, September 10, 1977. Roess and Sansone, 339.

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1979.528 It created no demonstrable effect on crime rates -- in fact, as Sliwa admitted, several of
their early exploits were faked for publicity.529 Nevertheless, as Reiko Hillyer argues, the group’s
composition of Black and Latino youth helps give lie to the notion that the crime wave was
merely a fiction created by conservative politicians, or that its victims were only pearl-clutching
middle class whites.530 Indeed, subway riders in the minority-heavy Brooklyn neighborhoods of
East New York and Brownsville experienced a wave of gold-chain necklace thefts, which
accounted for forty percent of all felonies in the subways in mid-1980.531
Almost any review of Davidson’s Subway mentions the enormous amount of graffiti on
the inside of trains. “Writing” was a self-conscious movement in which young people used
markers to place their call signs, usually in plain script, on high-visibility urban spaces such as
lamp posts or subway cars.532 A new subcategory within the ancient category of expression
known as graffiti, the writing of these “tags” first appeared in New York City in the summer of
1970, when a Washington Heights teenager named Demetrius combined his Greek nickname
“Taki” with the name of his street into TAKI 183.533 (Figure 3.66) He spawned countless
imitators, who, while economically and racially diverse, tended to be boys between eleven and
sixteen years of age who were, of necessity, fast and nimble runners.534 By early 1973, New York
528 The book to read for aspiring vigilantes is Subway Survival! (1980) by Bradley Steiner. It promises to teach
commuters an array of hand-axe chops, sidekicks, and chin-jab attacks to subdue the criminals allowed to run
rampant “thanks to liberal, scum-sympathizing laws, gun control, and a corrupt judicial and police establishment.”
Bradley Steiner, Subway Survival! The Art of Self-Defense on American Public Transit Facilities (Mason, MI:
Loompanics Unlimited, 1980), 5.
529 David Gonzalez, “Sliwa Admits Faking Crimes For Publicity,” New York Times, November 25, 1992, 1. 530 Reiko Hillyer, “The Guardian Angels: Law and Order and Citizen Policing in New York City,” Journal of Urban
History 43, no. 6 (2017): 886. 531 David Andelman, “Fads and Fears of Subway Crime,” New York Times, September 28, 1980, 6. 532 This pen and ink method is distinct from spray paint graffiti, which is considered one of the few indigenous art
forms in the US, and which was used to create the often-spectacular whole-car exterior murals. See Ivor Miller,
“Hip-hop Visual Arts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin A. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 34.
533 “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” New York Times, July 21, 1971, 37. 534 Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 67-69.

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magazine could say, accurately, “this thing has gotten completely out of hand.”535 When
covering a subway car’s interior, the effect was ugly. (Figure 3.67) The Times recorded one
critic’s deft reaction: “‘this is a dump train,’ he said loudly, glaring angrily at the other
passengers. ‘Mama, why are we riding in a dump train?’ ‘Shhh!’ his mother answered, and the
riders shifted uneasily and looked away.”536
Yet the mainstream press rarely matched this critic’s fiery rhetoric in photographic form.
For an article published in the Times in 1977, Neal Boenzi made a black and white photo of
stone-faced commuters packed shoulder to shoulder, the frame filled up with faces,
advertisements, hands, and handrails. (Figure 3.68) In another photograph, a conductor pushes
passengers through the closing subway door so the train can depart, while a third photo shows a
nearly deserted train after midnight. The caption accompanying all three reads, “outwardly
impassive, the subway rider stands resignedly on his noisy, bumpy road home.”537 It is not just
the passengers who are impassive; the photographs themselves are, as well. If they evoke
discomfort, it is because of their subject matter. With their full range of tones and no obvious
darkroom manipulation, the photographs themselves aspire to a kind of artless vessel of
information. That condition of unaltered indexicality is foregrounded in a photograph by Fred W.
McDarrah in a 1980 Village Voice story.538 (Figure 3.69) The photographer, or perhaps the
designer, chose to print the image of a graffiti-covered train exterior with the unexposed black
edge of the film visible. This proves to the audience that the frame had not been cropped, and
that what entered the lens is shown in its entirety in the print. The photographs convey the
535 Richard Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” New York, March 26, 1973, 35. 536 Robin Herman, “Vandals Take Psychological Toll,” New York Times. May 21, 1979, A1. 537 Ralph Blumenthal, “Four Days on Subway -- A Fresh Look at Lingering Problems,” New York Times, March 1,
1977, 61.
538 Pinkwas, 25.

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appearance of the subway accurately but lack all traces of our critic’s emotional response to the
scene.
The press did run more expressive images of the subway at its darkest hour, but these
tended not to be photographs. For a particularly bleak story from 1970 in the Times entitled
“Some Call it ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta,’” Michelle Horwitz created a witty sculpture in
which she depicted a subway car as a tin can, its lid partly open and stuffed with tiny human
figurines.539 (Figure 3.70) A sculpture made and photographed for another article published six
years later (entitled “Our Subways: Worthy of a Second Dante”) could be seen to depict the
consequences of treating mass transit as a meat-packer.540 Tom Hachtman and Joey Epstein’s
sculpture depicts a street-level subway entrance littered with trash from which explode five
enormous, hissing snakes and dragons. (Figure 3.71)
Davidson’s Subway
The problems of crime, graffiti, and train mechanics would have been obvious to
Davidson, both from firsthand experience and from extensive media coverage. As fellow
Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas has said,
Bruce defies easy classification as a news photographer. He takes ideas from the
news and then covers them in a way the news does not. When he worked on
Subway, for instance, he chose not to focus on subway crime but on the people
living through it and their relationship to the troubled environment that surrounded
them.541
Unsurprisingly, Davidson wanted to make a different kind of photograph than what New
Yorkers saw in the news every day. To begin, he started dieting and exercising every day. He
539 Paul L. Montgomery, “Some Call It ‘The Black Hole Of Calcutta,’” New York Times, November 15, 1970, 8. 540 Ethan C. Eldon, “Our Subways: Worthy of a Second Dante,” New York Times, July 2, 1976, 27. 541 As members of a photography collective which pools resources and prestige, Magnum photographers have little
incentive to criticize each other publicly. They are not, in other words, objective public commentators on each
other’s work. That being said, Meiselas’ comment rings true. Goldberg, 8.

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bought a police pass, a map, an empty photo album, a small knife, a handkerchief in case of
bleeding, and a whistle to alert others in case of danger.542
The photos Davidson made in the subway almost always show people, representing a
broad range of race, class, gender, and age. Physical proximity to overheated bodies is a common
theme. (Figure 3.72) Multiple men have highly visible, unsettling facial scars. (Figure 3.73)
About the same number of photos show people living in abject poverty. (Figure 3.74) Most of
the photos were taken on trains, although others were taken on platforms and pedestrian tunnels.
Some offer glimpses of distant Manhattan, but the viewer never seems to “arrive;” there is only
endless, grim circling. Perhaps this explains, paradoxically, the occasional moment of human
warmth or beauty, such as this young family smiling back at the camera. (Figure 3.75) Within
the self-contained logic of the book, at least, the subjects of Davidson’s photographs seem to
have been given life sentences underground, and they have adapted as best they can. Sometimes,
Davidson’s gaze appears to be desirous, and the women who catch his attention are often women
of color; their skin laid bare by summertime clothes glows with warmth. (Figures 3.76-3.77) (As
one review put it, “flesh -- naked, scarred, heavily made up, and squeezing between the closing
doors -- is the subject of these lush color photographs.”)543 In one photograph, a young woman
with hair swept across her face stands on the exterior walkway between cars as the train crosses
Broad Channel towards Coney Island. (Figure 3.78) The cool tones of her clothes, the bridge,
and the expanse of water beyond feel soothing next to the furious reds and yellows found
elsewhere in the book. Ultimately, however, a subject’s smile, or a pleasant wash of afternoon
542 Goldberg, 144. Hero-worship trails Magnum to its very origins, and this project is no exception. One review of
Subway admired Davidson’s physical training regimen and his “guts” in facing dangerous situations such as the
mugging at knifepoint. Grace Schaub, “Subway,” Popular Photography 94, no. 6 (June 1987): 76-77. 543 “Photography,” New Yorker, November 22, 2004, 26.

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light functions the same way Davidson’s flash does, by casting the adjacent space into everdarker night.
Inventors’ search for a stable and accurate color photography -- and Davidson’s search
for expressive color photography -- were hard-fought battles. Early proponents of photography,
while eager to see the strange new technology gain traction, demonstrated anxiety about its many
shortcomings, starting with its lack of color.544 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the French inventor
and creator of the oldest known photograph, wrote to his brother in 1816, “my investigations up
to the present allow me to hope that my process will be successful. But I must be able to fix the
colors, that is the greatest preoccupation at the moment, and it is the most difficult. Without that
the whole thing is useless.”545 Researchers tried and failed repeatedly to find an accurate and
permanent color process. It would be another century until Kodachrome slide film allowed
photographers to make endless prints from one piece of film, at a low cost, and with great
fidelity, thus ensuring color’s dominance in our society.546 Ironically, photographers were soon
to discover the creative limitations of color film. Photographers had to ship their exposed film
back to Kodak to undergo the extremely complicated developing process. Even if,
hypothetically, the photographer owned the necessary materials to develop film themselves at
home, they would have found themselves unable to exercise any creative control. While black
and white film can be deliberately over- or underdeveloped in order to achieve certain visual
effects, color must be developed according to precise time, temperature, and agitation rules.
Even worse, due to the prohibitive expense and complexity of color enlargers, printing was also
done in the lab, thus depriving the photographer of their ability to control local color, value, and
544 Steffen Siegel, “No Room for Doubt? Daguerre and His First Critics,” in Photography and Doubt, ed. Sabine
Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón (London: Routledge Books, 2017), 38.
545 Erich Stenger, The March of Photography (London: Focal Press, 1958), 206. 546 Max Kozloff, “Photography: The Coming of Age of Color,” Artforum 13, no. 5 (January 1975): 31.

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contrast.547 It was as if a jeweler were forced to work with uncut gems, taken straight from the
ground and still covered in dirt. Eliot Elisofon, an artistically-minded photojournalist whose staff
position at Life overlapped with Davidson’s time there, could sympathize:
The color photographer, who of necessity works with a mechanical object, the
camera, is very often taken over by the instrument and film. [emphasis mine] Does
he ever wish that a sky were less bright blue, that a softer tone would be better with
the principal subject in the photograph?548
This did not turn away every photographer -- as Katherine Bussard and Vanessa Schwartz both show us,
significant artists had been shooting, publishing, and exhibiting color photographs decades before the
supposed “color-shift” of the 1970s -- but it turned away many.549 Elisofon found an outlet in staged
photography, which could not only accommodate the long turnaround time of color film, but which
could also give him a hand in art directing colorful costumes and props, and working with colored gels
and filters. For example, he served as color consultant on John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge (Figure
3.79) and later published his own stills taken on set in Life.550 (Figure 3.80) In the summer of 1953, he
used artificially colored light to establish mood in his portraits of leading Hollywood actresses, also
published in the same magazine. (Figures 3.81-3.82)
547 Lisa Hostetler, “Real Color,” in Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, edited by
Lisa Hostetler and Katherine Bussard (New York: Aperture, 2013), 23.
548 Wilson Hicks, Words and Pictures: An Introduction to Photojournalism (New York: Harper & Brothers
Publisher, 1952), 100. “Great Ideas on Color,” Popular Photography, July 1, 1965, 64. 549 See Katherine Bussard, “Full Spectrum: Expanding the History of American Color Photography,” in Color Rush:
American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, edited by Lisa Hostetler and Katherine Bussard (New
York: Aperture, 2013), 3 and Schwartz, chap. 4.
550 Interviewed about his work on the film, Elisofon “It's fictional color! Since movies are a form of fiction, how
much better to make the color fictional, too! I've never believed that color in pictures ought to be a facsimile of the
real thing. Good artists take what they like from reality and discard the rest. Back in the Renaissance, painters were
already using certain glazes of transparent color to get an effect of luminosity. I hold that filters are to a
photographer what glazes are to a painter.” Brendan Gill and Lillian Ross, “The Talk of the Town: Fictional Color,”
New Yorker, March 14, 1953, 24. For more on Moulin Rouge and color, see chapter 1 of Vanessa R. Schwartz, It's
So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007.

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Davidson started his subway project using black and white film (Figure 3.83) but
switched to color, hoping to harness its expressive potential.551 He had done extensive shooting
in color, going back at least to his 1957 street scenes made in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
(Figure 3.84) In these photographs, the color adds an extra layer of description of the subject, but
is not the subject itself. It is useful, perhaps, but not beautiful. Although his friend and mentor
Ernst Haas had been making gorgeous, semi-abstract color views for several years by the time
Davidson met him in the late 1950s, following his lead was not easy.552 Interviewed for the
September 1959 issue of Popular Photography, Davidson said that he found color photography
to be a greater challenge than black and white because doing it well required the “orchestration
of color; the choice of not only the colors, but also their relative amounts and arrangements.”553
[emphasis mine] What to make of a scene containing a handful of unruly and demanding colors
drawing attention to parts of a scene which may not even be important? A humbled Davidson
noted, “we are still children in its use.”554
But by the early 1960s, Davidson had turned himself into a colorist, as evidenced by his
work for Vogue. (Contrary to Magnum’s mythos of black and white humanism, its members
were shooting color fashion photography within a year of the agency’s founding.555) (Figure
3.85) Sometimes Davidson’s color was naturalistic -- although carefully selected and ordered --
as in this beach fashion spread of a lithe model in an apple-green swimsuit and cap and orange
nail polish floating amidst brilliant highlights dotting the surface of dark jade-colored water.
(Figure 3.86) Other times, his color could be powder-delicate, as in this pale pink and blue early551 Kroemer, 309. 552 Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion, chap. 4. 553 “We Asked The Pros,” Popular Photography, September 1959, 10. 554 Ibid. 555 The iconoclastic book to read on Magnum is Nadya Bair’s The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the
Postwar Image Market, 2020.

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Easter cover shot. (Figure 3.87) Still other photographs feature otherworldly, artificial, hypersaturated color (most likely accomplished with gels or filters,) the effect of which is somewhat
similar to when an insect is trapped in amber: an all-over stain, a seemingly sourceless chromatic
atmosphere. (Figures 3.88-3.89)
Years later, contemplating the subway project, Davidson confronted a problem. How to
achieve similarly dramatic color effects, but only in the places he wanted -- and rein in
distracting color elements elsewhere -- while shooting not in a controlled studio environment but
on a moving train amidst the chaos of New York City? Pleased with its rich color and high
contrast, Davidson again decided to use Kodachrome.556 The very low ISO of the particular film
he chose (ISO 64) had the same effect as using a fast shutter speed in the Garden Cafeteria
previously -- it made the scene appear dark. Davidson then added an intentionally under-powered
flash to penetrate just the upper-most layer of the gloaming.557 The effect is to make ordinary
scenes of subway passengers appear as if Davidson were unearthing a body -- rich splashes of
color, such as this woman’s blonde hair (Figure 3.90) or this man’s glowing brown chest and
crucifix (Figure 3.91) -- amidst gathering night.558 Davidson himself compared the effect to that
which he’d seen in “photographs of deep-sea fish thousands of fathoms below the ocean surface,
a glowing in total darkness once light had been applied.”559 This spotlit, saturation effect was
Davidson’s solution to the long-standing question of how to harness color’s powerful expressive
potential -- to orchestrate its rise and fall like a maestro. Perhaps in those sordid and precarious
times, cutting the light to the New York City subway would have felt like merely the inevitable
next step in the city’s bleak descent. But it was in Davidson’s selective re-application of light
556 Goldberg, 144. 557 Kozloff, “New York: Capital of Photography,” 62. 558 Ibid. 559 Davidson, Subway, 10.

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with the use of his camera’s flash that helped Davidson control his film’s color and awaken his
photographs’ expressive potential.
Davidson’s flash confirmed his presence to his fellow passengers, but seemed to confirm
very little to the photographer himself. His metaphorizing -- his attempt at explaining what lay
before him to himself and to his audience -- becomes supercharged and frantic. In one moment
he is an underwater explorer, lighting up the depths with his camera:
I found that the strobe light reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the defaced
subway cars created an iridescence like that I had seen in photographs of deep-sea
fish thousands of fathoms below the ocean surface, glowing under electronic
flash.560
In another moment, he is “a space explorer entering the next galaxy, light years away.”561
The graffiti covering the interior of the cars appeared to him like “hieroglyphics.”562 (Figure
3.92) The 14th Street L train remains entombed for the duration of its run, except when it
emerges briefly next to an old cemetery in Brooklyn, its passengers, in Davidson’s eyes,
“unaware that they looked as if they’d risen from these graves.”563 (Figure 3.93) Referring
perhaps to the physical and ethical depths of this subterranean catastrophe, Davidson told one
interviewer that the photos look “like the Grand Canyon.”564 In an echo of Lewis Mumford’s
bitter musings on the subway as fallout shelter, Davidson said the trains looked like “the last of
the planet before we screwed it up.”565 The ever-present graffiti tags behind passengers appeared
to be “growing out of their heads like the snakes writhing in the hair of the Greek goddess
560 Goldberg, 145. 561 Davidson, Subway, 11. 562 Goldberg, 143. 563 Davidson, Subway, 14. 564 Paul Sullivan, “Tunnel visions,” Financial Times, November 6, 2004,
https://www.ft.com/content/3adb43c0-2e28-11d9-a86b-00000e2511c8 565 Ibid.

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Medusa, or like brain waves revealing their inner thoughts.”566 (Figure 3.94) The passengers
were both actors and audience in “an incredible theater of the absurd.”567
Given what was at stake for the millions of people who used the New York City subway
every day, it is worth asking what the value of such similizing might be. Critics Linda Andre and
Edit DeAk wrote the two most scathing responses to Davidson’s project, much of which can be
traced back in one form or another to Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as filtered through the
still fairly recent writings of Susan Sontag.568 To Andre and DeAk, the subway photographs
aestheticize and exoticize (turning graffiti, for example, into “hip wallpaper…the calligraphic
decor of the illiterate”) but offer no real knowledge or understanding. Instead we get selection
and exaggeration -- a dismal hellscape instead of what most people experience as just another
frustrating element of city life, the “awkward limbo between work and leisure, weariness and
sleep, public and private lives.”569 Davidson has forsaken the admirable long-term commitment
to individual subjects he demonstrated in the earlier East 100th Street project in favor of being
another shoot-and-run “paparazzo of the underdog.”570 As DeAk writes, “even Leni Riefenstahl
bothered to make the trip to Africa, repenting, suffering the hardships.”571 (Ouch!)
Critic Gene Thornton accused Davidson, with cause, of slumming. This “successful
commercial photographer who, by his own account, is more used to traveling in the first-class
compartment of intercontinental jets than in the subways,” seems to believe that “life is more real
566 Davidson, Outside Inside: 1966-2009, 354. 567 Jane Gottlieb, “Photo Album: Bruce Davidson,” PDN 24, no. 10 (October 2004): 32. 568 Linda Andre, “Down the Tubes,” Afterimage (February 1983): 18. Edit DeAk, “Bruce Davidson,” Artforum, 21,
no. 6 (February 1983): 82-83. 569 Ibid 83. Andre, 18. 570 DeAk, 82. 571 Ibid 83.

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in the slaughterhouse than at the dining table of millionaires, though he thanks God that he
himself does not have to spend much time there.”572
In what was by far the gravest and most sustained metaphor Davidson seems to have
made, he compares the subway to the trains Nazis used to deport their victims during the
Holocaust. I do not hold this comparison to be valid, but I believe he did, as evidenced by such
lines as this:
Sometimes, returning…during the evening rush hour, I would see the packed cars
of the subway as cattle cars, filled with people, each face staring or withdrawn with
the fear of its unknown destiny.573
Vicki Goldberg’s Bruce Davidson: An Illustrated Biography contains a crucially important
variation of this text later given to her by Davidson, in which he says the cattle cars were “filled
with people doomed to a terrible fate.”574 [emphasis mine] The phrase “cattle car” could
certainly refer to any subway car which happens to be packed with people. But if that were the
case, why would passengers withdraw in “fear of [their] unknown destiny” when the only reason
someone would brave the subway in the first place would be to get to a specific destination?
Similarly, why would passengers choose to pay a fare for the pleasure of being “doomed to a
terrible fate?” In her book The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the
Holocaust, Simone Gigliotti includes quotes from eleven different Holocaust survivors in which
they independently describe the Nazi trains as “cattle cars.”575 Further evidence for my
572 Gene Thornton, “The Subway Viewed Ambivalently,” New York Times, October 10, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/10/arts/the-subway-viewed- ambivalently.html. 573 Davidson, Subway, 9. 574 Due to Davidson’s advanced age and the COVID-19 pandemic, he refused to grant the author any interviews or
access to his archive, which is located in his apartment. Therefore, Vicki Goldberg’s book Bruce Davidson: an
Illustrated Biography has been an invaluable aid in writing this chapter. My central argument, however, is nowhere
reflected in her writing. Goldberg, 142.
575 Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2010), 93, 94, 99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113.

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interpretation may be found in the sentences immediately prior, which list three events related to
Jewish experience, but scattered across the city:
I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I'd photographed several years
before. The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the
decaying nearby neighborhoods. I photographed the people I had known there,
survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the
Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. The story, characters, and
atmosphere of the film I had hoped to direct were still with me as I walked along
Essex Street to visit an old scribe who repaired faded Hebrew characters on sacred
Torah scrolls. He and his wife, both survivors of Dachau, worked together in their
small religious bookstore.576 (emphasis mine)
As Davidson began photographing the traffic islands that run down the middle of
Broadway, such as this one in which Isaac Bashevis Singer poses, (Figure 3.95) “I started to
draw a connection between the Broadway islands, the neighborhood cafeteria, and the pious
scribe on the Lower East Side,” he writes, “the connection was the subway.”577 The subway
would be the drain down which these dark memories would flow.
The book is clearly not an illustration of historical events. Rather, it is a highly personal
vision of New York City’s subway which has been darkened by exposure to the cadaverous past.
The degree of literalness in Davidson’s comparison varies. A photograph of a German Shepherd
sitting at the feet of two armed policemen (Figure 3.96) clearly recalls similar photographs from
the Nazi era.578 (Figure 3.97) A more ambiguous photograph shows a Hasidic man sunken in the
darkness of a stairwell, the strong diagonal of a handrail seemingly pinning him down in the
gloom. (Figure 3.98) Someone has used a wide black marker to tag the white ceramic tile wall
576 Davidson, Subway, 9. 577Davidson, Subway, 9. 578 Due in large part to the advocacy and breeding program of retired Prussian military captain Max von Stephanitz
beginning in the late 19th century, the German Shepherd became a symbol for Nazis of “Germanic” purity, loyalty,
and fearlessness -- as well as an instrument of terror to be used against the Reich’s enemies. Aaron Skabelund,
“Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields of the ‘German’ Shepherd Dog,” Society & Animals 16, no. 4 (January
2008): 354, 359.

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behind him in swooping, abstract lettering; the shapes seem to emanate from his mind. The effect
is similar to that of a photograph by Davidson’s colleague at Magnum, David “Chim” Seymour
made decades earlier. That photograph depicts a young girl named Tereska Adwentowska in
1948 who lived in a residence for so-called “disturbed children” in Poland.579 (Figure 3.99)
During the Warsaw uprising, her father had been brutally beaten for his role in the Polish
Underground, her grandmother had been killed, and Tereska had been hit by shrapnel which left
her brain-damaged.580 Just before the photo was taken, Tereska’s teacher had prompted the class
to draw “home;” the centrifugal chaos on the chalkboard was her response.581 Although
Davidson was only 15 years old when the photograph was first published in Life, it is difficult to
imagine he did not know it. Not only was it the most famous picture made by Seymour, a cofounder of the photography collective of which Davidson was a member, but it was also featured
in the blockbuster exhibition Family of Man.
582 What the elderly man’s more elegant but still
strange emanation might mean is unknowable. Perhaps it is a muttered curse, a prayer, or
perhaps it, too, refers to a long-vanished “home.”
One photograph, taken from the platform, shows a train careening diagonally across the
frame, spattered in blood-red paint: it seems to have arrived fresh from the abattoir, and already
full of its next load of human. (Figure 3.100) A second image could be the grim aftermath of the
first. (Figure 3.101) Again, a train is shown running diagonally across the page, but this time it is
still. Instead of livid red, it is rotting green. Instead of carrying passengers packed shoulder to
shoulder, this train appears to only carry one person, and he is laid out on the bench like a corpse.
579 Carole Naggar, “Unraveling a 70-Year-Old Photographic Mystery,” Time, April 12, 2017,
https://time.com/4735368/tereska-david-chim-seymour. 580 Ibid. 581 Ibid. 582 Ibid.

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Perhaps the most rancid image Davidson made shows three passengers with heads bowed
miserably, seated under a chaos of graffiti on the wall above. (Figure 3.102) The interior is
bathed in a sickly green light, what experts call the “green spike” of early fluorescent tube
lighting. Davidson often used a magenta filter to balance out the effect, but probably didn’t this
time in order to retain the natural color coming in the window. The glowing light is in reality just
the setting sun, but in the nightmare other-world of this photograph, all signs of Nature have long
been snuffed out. Instead, the fiery pandemonium is the train’s terminus, or rather that of its
passengers.
Another photograph is an expanse of black partitioned by narrow, pale grey and pale
yellow stripes (Figure 3.103) (not unlike Barnett Newman’s bleak 1949 Abstract Expressionist
painting The Promise, but with horizontal “zips” instead of vertical ones.) (Figure 3.104) A
closer look at the photograph, however, reveals a small, pale yellow, flamelike shape in the
middle of the frame. It is a middle-aged man’s shirt and face, mostly masked by his black
overcoat which disappears into the larger darkness around him. Some municipal stenciled text
and graffiti are apparent nearby, although the details are obscured by a layer of fuzzy, ash-grey
dots sprinkled across the surface of the image, which are in fact out-of-focus snowflakes falling
on this elevated train station. As it happens, Sonderkommandos who were forced to scatter the
ashes of those murdered at Auschwitz hid artifacts amongst the detritus, as one wrote, “so the
world could find tangible traces of the millions of murdered people.”583 Some of the artifacts
uncovered from the ash were photographs.584
583 Zalmen Gradowski, The Last Consolation Vanished: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 53.
584 “Into these very ashes,” Georges Didi-Huberman writes, “all around the crematoria, members of the
Sonderkommando will have mixed as many as possible of their surviving things: bodily things (hair, teeth), sacred
things (phylacteries), image-things (photographs), written things (the Scrolls of Auschwitz)...” One
Sonderkommando named Alter Foincilber later stated under oath that he had buried a camera: “I have buried, in the
terrain of the Birkenau camp near the crematoria, a camera, the remains of the gas in a metal box, and notes in

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Let us consider a final example in which Davidson -- just like Singer before him --
explicitly links the New York City subway to the Holocaust. A middle-aged woman suffering
from a mental health crisis undresses in the middle of the train. (Figure 3.105) At her feet she has
thrown “some soiled articles of underclothing, a hotel towel, a pair of worn shoes, and a wine
bottle.”585 Even as other passengers exited the car to avoid her, Davidson stayed put.
I rode with the woman to the end of the line at South Ferry. Along the way, I
recalled an image from a book of war atrocities called The Yellow Star, of a woman
-- young and vivacious -- who'd been stripped naked on a street during a Nazi
manhunt in Poland.586
Davidson is presumably referring to this image shown at left of a woman crying out in
desperation as an older woman appears to try to protect her. (Figure 3.106) It appears on page 94
of Gerhard Schoenberner’s The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933 – 1945.
(Although originally published in German in 1960, a translated version of The Yellow Star was
reissued in 1979, the year before Davidson began working on his project.) The image is a still
taken from a short film made by an unnamed German soldier of the July 1941 pogrom in Lviv.
The city had been part of Poland before the war, but was taken by Soviet forces at the outset of
hostilities. As Nazi forces quickly advanced on the city in summer of 1941, the Soviets murdered
thousands of political prisoners, including many Ukrainian nationalists, before retreating. Upon
discovering the slaughter, Nazis decided to blame the local Jewish population, thus inciting the
deadly pogrom. Ritual humiliation, murder, and sexual violence, shown here perpetrated on this
young woman, were rampant.587
Yiddish on the number of people who had arrived in the convoys and were sent to be gassed. I remember the exact
location of these objects and I can show them at any moment.” Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All:
Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 46, 110. 585 Davidson, Subway, 13. 586 Ibid. 587 John-Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd.”
Canadian Slavonic Papers 53, no. 2-4 (2011): 210-213.

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Davidson descends into the equally depressed train station and, conditioned by his recent
experiences with Holocaust literature and survivors, searches for evidence justifying his hellish
mood. Yet time and time again, the particularities of the New York City subway resist being
incorporated into his framework. The idiosyncratic fashions of the day, (Figure 3.107) the
silhouette of the World Trade Towers, (Figure 3.108) the proud parent of a graduating student:
(Figure 3.109) the time, place, and mood point in any number of directions, none of which lead
to 1940s Poland. Writing in the New York Times, critic Gene Thornton noted the ambivalence in
the work -- the glimpse of a smile next to the horror and degradation -- and takes it as evidence
of Davidson’s failure to make up his mind. This leaves the photographer, according to Thornton,
“veer[ing] uncertainly between sensationalism and sentimentality.”588 But instead of reading
Subway as a failure, one might instead consider the potential therapeutic value of this realization
for Davidson. In explaining to one interviewer why he had begun the project in the first place, he
said “all I was trying to do was bring myself out of a depression.”589 By setting himself up for the
worst, Davidson was heartened by what he had found instead.590
588 Ibid. 589 Paul Sullivan, “Tunnel visions,” Financial Times, November 6, 2004, https://www.ft.com/content/3adb43c0-
2e28-11d9-a86b-00000e2511c8. On a tour of the 1982 exhibition at the ICP, Davidson admitted, “The theme was
not really the subway. The theme was really myself.” Michael Brenson, “Art People,” New York Times, September
24, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/24/arts/art-people-liberty-isle-s-new-statues.html. 590 Indeed, Davidson’s next project, made in Central Park between 1991 and 1995, suggests a vastly different mood.
Bruce Davidson and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, “Central Park,” accessed January 24, 2024,
https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/environment/bruce-davidson-central-park. He told one interviewer that
upon arriving in the park, “I’m taken over by the silence of the trees, by the feel of the wind…all my troubles seem
to fall away.” Susan Stamberg, “Bruce Davidson Chronicles Life in Central Park,” NPR, Washington, D.C.,
November 22, 1995. Couples embrace near a pond and children swing from branches. Davidson’s unusually wideangle lenses eagerly gather up entire vistas, as if they had been starved by the claustrophobic confines of the
subway. He used a medium format panoramic Noblex camera with a 150mm lens and a medium format Hasselblad
camera with a fisheye lens; even when standing close to his subjects, they appeared surrounded by foliage. Trevor
Gett, “Park Life,” British Journal of Photography 143 no. 7102 (November 13, 1996): 18.

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Undercover Photo
A final photograph may help us better see the gap between the nightmarish appearances
in Davidson’s photographs and the reality of the subway. Davidson finished shooting this project
in 1980, but in 1985, he returned underground, camera in hand. Editors at New York had
presumably seen or at least heard of the work and hired him to photograph a story about crime in
the subway. The cover photograph shows a man, furiously uncoiled, thrusting a .38 caliber
revolver against another man’s right temple. (Figure 3.110) The armed man’s unbuttoned satin
St. John’s jacket, his baseball cap worn sideways, and his left arm holding the pistol together
form a nest of slashing, vivid red.591 Large, imitation Cazal sunglasses obscure much of his face,
but his mouth is frozen in some bellowed command.592 The man on the other end of the pistol is
crouched against a subway door scrawled with graffiti, wearing a pale beige coat, his brow
knitted, his left hand reaching up to intercept the gun with exquisite gentleness.
Judging from the cover, it would be easy to assume that the subway’s condition had only
spiraled further downward since Davidson last pictured it. (Figure 3.111) Such dramatic spot
news photographs are exceedingly difficult to capture, so the subway must have been teeming
with armed robbers -- how else could a photographer have gotten this shot? In fact, this
assumption would have been entirely wrong.
The man in red was not an enraged mugger but rather an undercover cop arresting a
chain-snatching felon. The officer’s name was Billy Carter, and he was one of twelve transit
cops chosen in 1985 to work in a new plainclothes decoy unit.593 Carter was known to play
591 Michael Daly, “Hunting the Wolf Packs,” New York, June 3, 1985, 38. 592 Ibid. 593 Decoy units had been running successfully for years within the city police department, i.e. the above-ground
cops, and had inspired the creation of similar units in other cities. The program was first adopted by the transit
police in 1975. It was renewed in 1980 to combat the rise of chain snatching (which was due in part to the increased
price of gold), in 1988 to combat hate crimes, and again in 1991.

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Mendelssohn in the police van on the way to the job site, but once there, transform into a
loudmouth with a boombox and a fake joint made of Lipton tea.594 His demeanor on the job was
commanding enough that he could stop a perp in his tracks by extending his index finger forward
and his thumb upward, the way a child mimics a gun.595 Transit work was bleak -- the subway
was dark, dirty, and when one’s radio failed to work, as it often did, one found oneself alone with
no backup.596 This small unit, with its exciting, duplicitous work, was considered highly
prestigious by the 3,800 total officers in the broader transit force.597 Eight to ten cops would
gather in the last car of a given train (since it was the furthest from the motorman and conductor,
people intent on crime tended to congregate there.)598 A few of these officers would be assigned
the role of costumed decoy, in order to lure would-be muggers into the kind of explosive booby
trap shown in the photograph. The rotating cast of characters the decoys would play included a
drunken lawyer, (Figure 3.112) a pizzeria worker, (Figure 3.113) a blind man, (Figure 3.114) and
the out-of-towner conference attendee complete with name tag reading “Hi! My name is Vic” (an
William R. Carlsen, “Police Are Curbing Street Crimes With Decoys Disguised as Victims,” New York Times, July
10, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/07/10/archives/police-are-curbing-street-crimes-with-decoys-disguised-asvictims.html. Joseph P. Treaster, “Police Decoy-Victim Strategy Takes to Subways,” New York Times, January 7,
1976,
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/07/archives/police-decoyvictim-strategy-takes-to-subways.html. Leonard Buder,
“Plainclothes Police Force To Combat Chain Thefts,” New York Times, September 26, 1980,
https://www.nytimes.com/1980/09/26/archives/plainclothes-police-force-to-combat-chain-thefts-two-slain-inchain.html. David E. Pitt, “Decoy Unit On Bias Cases Is Readied,” New York Times, January 12, 1988,
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/12/nyregion/decoy-unit-on-bias-cases-is-readied.html. Ralph Blumenthal,
“Police Lure: Trolling for Subway Thieves,” New York Times, March 28, 1991,
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/28/nyregion/police-lure-trolling-for-subway-thieves.html. 594 Daly, 38. 595 Ibid 31. 596 Michael Daly, interview by the author, April 6, 2024. 597 “Why Surrender on the Subway?” New York Times, January 4, 1985,
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/04/opinion/why-surrender-subway-bernhard-goetz-hero-for-allegedly-shootingfour-teen-agers.html. Michael Daly, interview by the author, April 6, 2024. Todd S. Purdum, “Pro & Con: Tactics of
Transit Officers; Police Decoys, Temptation and Crime,” New York Times, January 3, 1988,
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/03/weekinreview/region-pro-con-tactics-transit-officers-police-decoystemptation-crime.html. Jack Maple and Chris Mitchell, The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business
(New York: Doubleday, 1999), 175. Herman Goldstein, “Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach,”
Crime and Delinquency 25, no. 2 (April 1979): 237. 598 Maple and Mitchell, 56.

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inside joke: “vic” is cop-speak for “victim.”)599 One perp the unit collared ought to have seen
through the disguises -- he was carrying a copy of the very New York magazine article illustrated
with Davidson’s photographs at the time of his arrest.600
Not only does the photograph not show a crime in progress, but crime was actually quite
rare in the subway in 1985. (As Davidson wrote, “hours went by riding the train from one end of
the line to the other without incident” before he made the cover photograph.601) In fact, it was far
safer to be in the subway than to be above ground.602 There were more vehicular homicides on
street level than murders underground, and there were fifty times as many accidental automobile
deaths as accidental subway deaths.603 Robberies and larcenies were twenty times more common
above ground than below.604 And the number of felonies in the subway, which had held steady
for the past four years, accounted for less than 3% of all felonies in the city.605 Nevertheless, as
599 However, Jack Maple, the officer in charge of the unit, found it worked best when the character contradicted
public expectations of what a cop might be willing to perform -- thus, the transvestite, the mixed-race couple, and
the belligerent gay man. Maple and Mitchell, 57. 600 Written by Michael Daly, a veteran crime reporter who has written for the Village Voice and the Daily News,
where he would later be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the story is by turns riveting and tragic. It
focuses on “wolf packs,” groups of young men who would descend on a victim with bewildering speed in order to
separate them from their valuables, while leaving them with only a blur of bodies to describe to the police. Maple
and Mitchell, 57. See Michael Daly, “Hunting the Wolf Packs,” New York, June 3, 1985. The story begins in the
bedroom of eighteen-year-old Mark Ross of Brooklyn, and it follows him and his friends, at times moment-bymoment, as they take the train into Manhattan, trawl Times Square for people to rob, find no one, get dispirited, eat
dinner, finally find a mark -- and suddenly get slammed to the ground and arrested by the Transit Police Decoy
Squad -- at which point Daly begins following the squad, at times moment-by-moment, as they collar more perps.
Ibid. One alleged mugger they bring in is a nine-year-old who is surprised and pleased to find that he can slip out of
his adult-sized handcuffs; another is a fifteen-year-old with two children of his own, a prior arrest for attempted
murder, and a mother about whom one cop said, “she says his being arrested is a blessing. She doesn’t want him,
and she doesn’t like him.” Ibid.
601 “At 72nd Street,” Davidson wrote, “I noticed a youth enter the train carrying a walking stick with a heavy brass
head. He stood near the sleeping decoy, his eyes fixed on the gold chains. The next stop was 42nd Street, three
minutes away on the express. As the train pulled into the station, the mugger struck, ripping the chain from the
decoy and running toward me mumbling something about my camera. I looked up and my flash went off as I saw
the muzzle of a .38 pointed at the head of the mugger by one of the decoy team members. The mugger was arrested,
and later it was reported he had a long record of assaults and robberies.” Davidson, Subway, 15. 602 Jesus Rangel, “Statistically, At Least, It Is Rather Safe Down There,” New York Times, February 10, 1985,
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/10/weekinreview/statistically-at-least-it-is-rather-safe-down-there.html. 603 Ibid. 604 Ibid. 605 Ibid.

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many observers noted, it did not feel that way. The subway’s appearance -- its filthy floors, ugly
graffiti, and dim lighting made many subway riders feel like they were walking into a crime
scene.606 “We can have an endless philosophical debate on whether or not perception is more
important than reality,” said City Council President Carol Bellamy. “But while we’re having the
debate, people will flee the subways. And if people abandon the subways, we’ll lose the
lifeblood of this city.”607 The particularly sordid appearance of the subway system is thus in large
part responsible for the disproportionate number of police hired to work underground. As an
article in the Times by Jesus Rangel noted, in 1984, only 2.6 percent of all felonies in New York
City occurred in the subway, and yet its police system accounted for 12 percent of all officers.608
In reading the text accompanying Davidson’s spectacular photo of the undercover bust, we
discover the gap between our initial assumptions and the reality of the police work being done.
In doing so, we can better see the gap between Davidson’s ghastly vision of the subway and that
of most of its users.
Conclusion
In most of his work, Bruce Davidson’s life-long penchant for dark metaphor -- a
characteristic unremarked upon by most scholars -- becomes most apparent in his vivid, often
melancholic text. The alcoholics at the Rochester Mission were not men who had experienced
bad luck in life and genetics, but can be thought of as a collective portrait of Davidson’s family.
The Yale football team was not a group of young men at play, but rather the angsty photographer
himself. A was not A, but rather B, and so on. Creative people have struggled through this thicket
606 Ibid. For some reason, Mayor Koch felt compelled to remind New Yorkers that, when in the subway, “you don't
feel that you can run and you feel alone and extremely vulnerable. You feel a greater fear in your mind, your heart,
your stomach, and in your gut.” Ibid. 607 Ibid. 608 Ibid.

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of associations before. Virginia Woolf once demanded, “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is
the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”609 Unlike Woolf, however, Davidson did
not struggle to beat back this thicket, but rather embraced it. In Subway, made at an emotional
low point in which Davidson was steeped in Holocaust stories and straying from the
documentary path, his nightmarish metaphor spills over from his text into his photographs,
darkening their edges until just a few violent splashes of color remain. Just as he exaggerated the
effect long known by city-dwellers by which artificial illumination banishes shadow under its
beam only to deepen it elsewhere, his inquiry uncovered another form of darkness -- the darkness
of endless, evasive metaphorizing.610
609 Cited in Denis Donoghue, Metaphor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 92. 610 Valance, 152.

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CHAPTER 3
Alvin Baltrop’s Waterfront Opacities
American photographer Alvin Baltrop (1948 - 2004) made an extraordinarily extensive
series of photographs of the ruined piers along the west side of Manhattan between 1975 and
1986. A victim of containerization and other economic forces, the shipping industry in New
York had been decimated in the postwar years, yet the near-bankrupt city did not have the
resources to tear down its rotting infrastructure. Instead, the massive, unlit piers became a
popular site for gay men cruising for sex. It is my belief that Baltrop’s photographs, instead of
shedding light on this seemingly covert activity, keep the piers “unlit.” While he captured some
scenes of explicit nudity, many more photographs seem to conceal more than they reveal.
Cruising men appear in the middle- or far distance, sometimes partially hidden behind the
detritus of the piers. In other photos, we see only a limb or two, in still others we see full figures
whose appearances are blasted free of detail by overexposure or shrouded by underexposure. I
argue that this was a deliberate strategy on Baltrop’s part to render this subculture partially
opaque, at a time of particularly intense scrutiny of gay people by famous artists, the law, and
homophobic people, especially from within African American culture. In other words, Baltrop
tells a story of darkness in New York which protects, and it is this darkness which links Baltrop
to the tradition of photographing in the dark. René Burri, caught unaware by an unprecedented
electrical blackout, found himself literally and figuratively in the dark. Unable to use his
trademark long-lens technique, uncertain if any of his shots would even register on the film
inside his camera, Burri imbued his work from that long, unsettling night with signs of his own
unknowing. Bruce Davidson imposed his own darkness (literally and figuratively) on the New
York City subway, dimming it with the use of a weak flash and reimagining this prosaic news

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story as a nightmarish regression into the darkest chapter of twentieth century history. If
Davidson peered into the city’s dark spaces and saw the fiery end point of intolerance, Baltrop
saw a place of refuge -- and he made sure his photographs helped keep it that way.
On the side of his camera bag, Baltrop had drawn a scene of the West Side Highway, as
shown from the water’s edge, looking back towards the city. (Figure 4.1) Depicted in planar
view, the elevated highway bisects the drawing. Above the roadbed are a few spindly streetlamps
and road signs set against plain sky. In comparison, the area below the roadbed, away from the
light, is positively teeming: heavy iron pillars with massive, striped footings hold up the
highway. A building’s windows are visible beyond and to the left. What appear to be two
vehicles huddle together next to one pillar. (Shipping trucks were left unlocked at night and so
became a frequent site of gay sex. Often called “labyrinths” by cruisers, these rows of vehicles
helped them evade exposure, arrest, and violence.)611 At far right, shipping containers or some
other kind of anonymous industrial detritus jut out of the frame, breaking the planar view. What
is below the roadbed may be disordered and gritty, but it is undeniably alive, while what is above
the roadway is just disciplined movement and cold, piercing light. Next to the drawing is the last
line of a poem by Baltrop written out in full elsewhere on the bag: “In the dark we call can be
free.” The complete poem reads:
In time we all hope for freedom or just to die
We all have this hope
The fear comes from the dark
The dark is in us all
We are able to hold on
We all laugh
We cry
The dark is all most of us have
611 Fiona Anderson, Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz And New York's Ruined Waterfront (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2019), 14.

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In the dark we all can be free.612 (Figure 4.2)
Whether he meant freedom from persecution, or freedom to seek pleasure, or perhaps both,
Baltrop uncovered, as it were, the bright side of darkness.613
The Piers
With their electricity long shut off, the piers at nighttime were almost completely dark,
and this darkness inspired some of the most beautiful writing of the gay literary scene at the time.
Edmund White described certain
…qualities of darkness, the darkness of gray silk stretched taut to form the sky,
watered by city lights, the darkness of black quartz boiling to make a river, and the
penciled figures of men in the distance, minute figures on -- is that a second story?
What are they doing up there?614
Into that darkness intrude mesmerizing flashes of light, revealing little but suggesting yet more
intrigue beyond:
…an approaching car on the highway outside casts headlights through the window
and plants a faint square on the wall. The square brightens till it blazes, then rotates
into a trapezoid narrowing to the point of extinction, its last spark igniting a hand
raised to hit a face.615
At times, a bright light draws the pupils down, until nothing else is visible: “a wind said
incantations and hypnotized a match flame up out of someone's cupped hands. Now the flame
went out and only the cigarette pulsed, each draw molding gold leaf to cheekbones.”616
As much as the darkness increased the likelihood of crime, many gay men also spoke of
its liberatory, democratizing effect. Pointing to one photograph during an interview, Baltrop
612 Randal Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought 52
(Spring-Summer 2012): 119. 613 Ibid. 614 Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 2. 615 Ibid 3. 616 Ibid 1.

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noted the unusual scene, “this guy was a banker and this one worked in soap operas. This guy
was a part-time minister. This guy was a security man.”617 The piers were a site of class mixing,
as privileged residents of the Upper West Side mingled with working class men from the
outskirts of Brooklyn.618 At times this took on the air of slumming, as in the case of the talented
writer and snob Andrew Holleran. “Why do gays love ruins?...Why do we love slums so much?”
the narrator asks in his short story Nostalgia for the Mud. The narrator’s friend replies, linking
the (supposedly monolithic) gay community to elite slummers such as Brahms, Proust, a
Princeton grad student, and Marie Antoinette, implying that the lofty must at times reach down
to the lowly -- forgetting that, for a large portion of New York City’s population in the late
1970s, visiting the piers was closer to a lateral socioeconomic move than a downward one.619 At
other times, elements of gay society in New York, themselves the subject of so much
discrimination, participated in discrimination themselves. Activists picketed The Monster, a gay
bar in Greenwich Village, accusing it of barring women and blacks at the door, and the Duchess,
a lesbian bar in the West Village, accusing it of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics.620
Nevertheless, these incidents seem to have been exceptional; the scene as a whole was closer to
what Dennis Altman called “a Whitmanesque democracy.”621
Gay men had long designated various parts of New York City as sites for cruising, from
Washington Park in the 1940s to Third Avenue near the Queensboro Bridge in the fifties, to the
Soldiers and Sailors Monument at 89th and Riverside in the sixties.622 In the lead-up to the
617 Osa Atoe, “Alvin Baltrop,” Colorlines, March 24, 2009, https://colorlines.com/article/alvin-baltrop. 618 Valerie Cassel Oliver, “Alvin Baltrop Dreams Into Glass,” Callaloo 2013-01-01, Vol.36 (1), 67. 619 Andrew Holleran, “Nostalgia for the Mud,” in The Christopher Street Reader, ed. Michael Denneny, Charles
Ortleb, and Thomas Steele (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983), 68-70. 620 Anderson, 20; Ibid 21. 621 Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1982), 206. Samuel Delany makes a similar claim to Altman’s in his book Times Square Red, Times
Square Blue. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 622 Doug Ireland, “Rendezvous in the Ramble,” New York Magazine, July 24, 1978.

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highly publicized 1964 New York World’s Fair, Mayor Robert Wagner ordered police raids of
popular cruising sites, pushing gay men to the very edges of the island of Manhattan.623 In the
1970s, the West Village and the Meatpacking District, both close to the Hudson River, became
home to several famous gay discos such as 12 West and Paradise Garage, as well as such
hardcore underground S&M clubs as the Anvil and the Mineshaft.624 The then-empty waterfront
piers were conveniently right next door, and made for a natural after-party site.
The day in 1956 when the first metal shipping containers were loaded by crane onto a
ship at Port Newark, New Jersey, stands as a turning point in the history of the modern era.625
(Figure 4.3-4.4) In decades past, the piers, lining the edges of Manhattan like a porcupine’s
quills, were the scene of tremendous, if back-breaking, economic activity.626 For all its postwar
wealth and technological sophistication, New York ports still relied on slow, low-tech, manual
labor. Workers at the point of origin (let us say, a factory in the area now known as Soho) loaded
goods by hand, one by one, onto a truck or railcar. Upon arriving at the port, other laborers
unloaded those goods by hand, one by one, recording each box or bag or drum or bale on a tally
sheet. The men carried these varied objects to a transit shed, where they would sit until the ship
was ready to load. When the ship was ready to load, men would drag or haul the goods next to
623 Fiona Anderson, “Cruising the Queer Ruins of New York's Abandoned Waterfront,” Performance Research
(2015) 20:3, 137.
624 Peter Braunstein, “Adults Only: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York During the 1970s,”
in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey & David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 144-
145.
625 See Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy
Bigger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 626 In 1961, New York City had more industrial workers than any other city in the world -- so many, as Jason
Epstein’s classic essay “The Last Days of New York” in the New York Review of Books notes, that the narrow
category of lens and scientific instrument manufacturing alone employed 20,000 people. Jason Epstein, “The Last
Days of New York,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/the-last-days-of-new-york.

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the ship, place them on wooden pallets, tie metal cables around each pallet, and then grab the
hook dangling down from the ship’s onboard crane and attach it to the pallet -- and it was only at
this point that a machine would take over, whining as it lifted the pallet up over the deck and
then down through a darkened hatch and into the ship’s hold -- at which point this entire process
unfolded again, but in reverse.627
Containerization made the cost of shipping goods plummet, with wide-ranging effects.
Manufacturers no longer had to submit to expensive and crowded cities in order to be close to
their consumers; instead, they picked up and moved to new factories in cheaper, more spacious
places and shipped their goods (cheaply) to buyers.628 Longshoremen’s jobs vanished, as did
their port-adjacent neighborhoods.629 And, most relevant to our story, containerization absolutely
destroyed the New York City port. Across the harbor, relatively undeveloped areas of New
Jersey were able to accommodate the new wave of containers. But in dense Manhattan,
longshore employment dropped 91 percent between 1963 and 1976.630 In 1974, the amount of
freight moving through the New York docks was one-fiftieth the amount in 1960.631 Several
years later, the artist David Wojnarowicz described one of these former nodes of global trade:
Inside in one of the back ground-floor rooms of the warehouse, there’s a couple of
small offices built into a garagelike space. Papers from old shipping lines scattered
like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture, three-legged desks, a
Naugahyde couch of mint green upside down, small rectangles of light and river
and wind over on the far wall.632
627 Levinson, 16-18. 628 Ibid 2. 629 Ibid 2. 630 Ibid 96. 631 Ibid 97. 632 David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (New York:
Open Road Media, 2014), 193.

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In December 1973, a highway repair truck laden with asphalt crashed through the
adjacent elevated section of the West Side Highway, forever closing that throughway and
underscoring the waterfront’s marginality. (Figure 4.5) The city government could not afford to
fix or remove the highway, and so it stood for fifteen years, in Douglas Crimp’s words, “as a
ghostly barrier between ‘civilized’ Manhattan and the Hudson River.”633 It was in this narrow
sliver of space that a new cruising culture flourished.
It could be argued that Baltrop’s body of work stands as something of a rejoinder to
Joshua Shannon’s 2009 book The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the
Postmodern City. In it, Shannon shows how four avant-garde artists around 1960 -- Claes
Oldenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd -- responded to the arrival of
postmodernity in New York City. Shannon’s definition of postmodernity focuses on the
transition from a manufacturing-based economy to one based on financial services and marked
by globalized commerce.634 This process, for Shannon, involved “the disappearance of objects” -
- the often gritty urban texture of industry, slums, narrow streets -- and the arrival of the
information economy (finance, insurance, and real estate), International Style high rises, and
highways.635 While influential critics of Judd’s work, and Judd himself, spoke of it in terms of
thingness, a kind of mute literalness, i.e. divorced from social context, Shannon sees Judd’s art
changing with the city.636 If the early work had the cast-off look of obsolete stuff, the later work
seemed to accept and respond to the sleek new postmodern world, pairing itself down to
seamless units of plexiglass or steel. To Shannon, there is more than a passing resemblance in
633 Douglas Crimp, “On Alvin Baltrop,” in The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa, (Milan:
Skira, 2020), 9.
634 Shannon, introduction. 635 Ibid. 636 Ibid, chap. 4.

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this later work to shipping containers -- the very things that had wrought so much destruction
upon old Manhattan’s landscape.637 (Figure 4.6) Perhaps Baltrop found, years after Judd had
made those works, evidence of an obdurate materiality and physicality on the very waterfront
site that had supposedly vanished -- crowds of men on the docks, still sweating and straining,
under threat of injury, always searching for their reward at day’s end.
This kind of queer historical loop, this refusal of elements to proceed from a single origin
unto a single destination, would have felt familiar to artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose
monumental architectural intervention “Day’s End” Baltrop photographed inside and out.638
(Figures 4.7-4.9) As Pamela Lee argues, Matta-Clark’s interventions in abandoned buildings
anointed American society’s detritus with meaning, and in doing so, implicitly resist the
Enlightenment-era notion of history as a kind of accumulative progression towards an ideal.639
By intervening in broken infrastructure, Matta-Clark helped make it newly visible. In his essay
“Action Around the Edges,” Douglas Crimp casts an ambivalent eye on the artist, both admiring
his secular waterfront cathedral, open to the sun setting in the west and to the water below, and
deriding the artist’s comments that the piers are “completely overrun by the gays” (which was,
well, true) and “dangerous” (also true) and his decision to change the locks after he and his team
had begun deconstruction (which was necessary, due to, among other things, the use of
blowtorches.)640
Considered by city authorities to be in effect a marginal jurisdiction, these abandoned
piers were lawless spaces. Gay men frequently fell prey to homophobic attacks and muggings.
637 Ibid. 638 Matta-Clark and assistants used power tools to carefully remove selected areas of the pier’s walls, ceiling, and
floor. Located on the west side of Manhattan, the newly opened building would glow with the setting of the sun,
giving it new life in its old age.
639 Pamela Lee, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), xvi. 640 Douglas Crimp, “Action Around the Edges,” in Before Pictures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016),
147 and 169.

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Warnings abounded about visiting at nighttime.641 After an off-duty transit cop killed two gay
men in 1968, only to be released without charges, the Mattachine Society, a gay rights
organization, ran an article in its newsletter titled “Docks, Darkness and Danger,” in which it
implored gay men to exercise caution when in the area.642 Another newsletter warned, “nite [sic]
time is prime time for muggers on both piers. Watch your back when cruising [pier numbers] 48-
49.” A spray-painted sign at one pier read, “Pickpocket paradise area. They work in teams every
night, be careful.”643 David Wojnarowicz once noted in his diary, “they had once found some
guy down there naked and tied up with his own shirt and belt, his wallet and valuables gone.”644
Baltrop recalled walking into a room “and there’d be two guys with 2x4s, beating a kid, and I’d
jump on them. I’ve gotten jumped by six guys at one time who tried to poke out my eyes.”645 He
carried a long stick with a razor blade attached to one end in case the rats got too close.646
Broken glass was scattered throughout and large holes in the floors revealed the trash-filled river
flowing below.647 Baltrop himself fell through the floor once, and had to be rescued by some
other men.648 Once, he photographed police drag a body from the river; no information is known
on the person’s identity or the police’s verdict. (Figure 4.10) Sex itself could be violent and
dangerous -- even before the AIDS epidemic began.649 The piers attracted countless young men
who had been caught in homosexual activity and thrown out of their family homes. Too often,
this marked the beginning of an increasingly perilous downward spiral. Speaking of two such
641 Anderson, 23. 642 Ibid 15. 643 Ibid 140-141. 644 David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 111. 645 “Piers Alvin Baltrop,” New York Native, May 11, 1992, 36. 646 Allen Frame, “I Don’t Want to be Alone: A Remembrance of Alvin Baltrop,” in The Life and Times of Alvin
Baltrop, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa (Milan: Skira, 2020), 72. 647 Anderson, 23. 648 Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” 121. 649 This stood in contrast to the commercial, supervised bathhouses and clubs, where it was tacitly agreed that a
participant could terminate violent sex at any time. Stephen Barber, Edmund White: The Burning World (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 59.

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young people, Baltrop told an interviewer, “the kids came to the river and they found this other
young guy who was sort of mad, who lived under the pier in a tent. He’d blow a couple guys and
buy his Hostess cupcakes and candles. He took these two kids in and taught them.”650
Baltrop’s Early Years
Alvin was a life-long New Yorker but was conceived far away from the piers. His mother
Dorothy Mae, like so many other African Americans, moved north after World War II. Pregnant
with Alvin, she left Virginia for the Bronx with only her young first-born James in tow. Alvin
was born on December 11, 1948, shortly after they arrived.651 (Figure 4.11) The brothers formed
a tight bond, in part due to a shared interest in art (James would take part in a group exhibition of
prints and drawings at the Studio Museum of Harlem in 1972.652) Alvin took up the camera
instead, shooting nude photos of his male and female friends in junior high school.653 The
brothers’ relationship was presumably a source of consolation for Alvin, given his frequent
conflicts with their devout Jevohah’s Witness mother.654 Looking back years later, Baltrop
imitated his mother’s attitude towards his work: “Oh, these pictures is the devil’s work.”655 In
fact, upon being discharged from the Navy in the early 1970s, he discovered that she had thrown
out nearly all his photographs, finding the nudes to be obscene, and the photos of speeches by
Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to be subversive.656 One image survives which exhibits many
of the hallmarks of his later work. In an untitled photo from 1965 in the Cloisters (a mixture of
650 “Piers Alvin Baltrop,” 36. 651 Wilcox, 118. 652 Randal Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004,” Third Streaming, accessed November 2, 2023,
http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography#_ftn13. 653 Ibid. 654 Oliver, 66. 655 Randal Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004,” Third Streaming, accessed November 2, 2023,
http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography#_ftn13. 656 Oliver, 66.

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various Medieval monasteries imported from Europe to upper Manhattan) we see an elderly
woman reading a book, her back facing the camera, illuminated by light from a single large
window. (Figure 4.12) Concentrated light creating high contrast, spectatorship, and clandestine
recording would remain part of Baltrop’s work until his death.657
To understand Baltrop’s personal life and cultural milieu, I rely in part on the work of
Baltrop’s close friend and assistant, the painter Randal Wilcox. Wilcox met Baltrop late in the
photographer’s life and was immediately impressed by his photographs. Wilcox interviewed
Baltrop multiple times, and, after the photographer’s death in 2004, rescued his body of work
from likely oblivion.658 He is currently executor of Baltrop’s estate.659 Since Wilcox’s writings
have proven him to be a thoughtful interpreter of Baltrop’s work, and given the scarcity of
primary sources made by Baltrop, I take Wilcox’s description of Baltrop’s early days seriously
as offering insight into the photographer’s life and art.
As a young man, Baltrop actively sought out the city’s cultural and political energy,
studying photographs at the Met, attending political rallies in Harlem, seeing performances at
The Living Theater, taking photographs at the Stonewall Inn, and visiting bookstores to buy
publications from City Lights Books and Grove Press. Marijuana, meditation, and leftist politics
filled his days.660 Here I will examine some photographs and theater Baltrop encountered during
these early years which may shed light on his later photographic subject matter and style. One
performance Baltrop witnessed, a loose adaptation by Richard Schecher’s Performance Group of
Euripides’ The Bacchae, is of particular interest. Making explicit reference to current events --
657 Wilcox, 118. 658 Holland Cotter, “He Captured a Clandestine Gay Culture Amid the Derelict Piers,” New York Times, September
19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/arts/design/alvin-baltrop-photographs.html. 659 “Third Streaming & The Alvin Baltrop Trust,” Third Streaming, accessed December 7, 2023,
https://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-trust. 660 Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.” Wilcox, 118. Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.”

154
the country’s war in Vietnam was experiencing its darkest moment yet -- Dionysus in 69 warned
its audience of the danger of blindly following powerful leaders such as Lyndon Johnson and
urged it to actively participate in politics.661 To concretize this, Schechner and his production
designers dissolved the traditional binary between audience and actors, so that audience
members would actively participate in the performance.662 (Figure 4.13) Actors encouraged
audience members to participate at various moments, and members could move fairly freely
throughout the performance.663 The director freely acknowledged the concept was not new, but
he gave it a name and (as a founder of the field of performance studies) visibility.664 In addition
to erasing the binary of stage/seats, and performer/audience, Schechner upset another tradition of
Western representation: the nude. Both male and female actors, after entering the room and
taking off their individuating street clothes in front of the audience, participated in full frontal
nudity, and did so in often highly charged, erotic scenes.665 Interestingly, Schechner later
contributed an essay to the landmark 1982 anthropology book A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive
Perspectives in Anthropology edited by Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby. Just as reflexive
anthropology breaks down the wall between researcher and subject such that the researcher is no
longer an out-of-sight “voice of God” but an active participant in knowledge building,
Schechner’s reflexive drama breaks down the wall between director and performance -- and
661 Christina Larocco, “Participatory Drama: The New Left, the Vietnam War, and the Emergence of Performance
Studies,” Cultural Politics 11, no. 1 (2015): 72. 662 Arnold Aronson, “An Interview with Richard Schechner on the 50th Anniversary of Dionysus in 69,” Theatre
and Performance Design 4, no. 4 (2018): 290. 663 Ibid. 664 Larocco, 71. 665 Aronson, 290.

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Baltrop would later break down the wall between photographic observer and participant.666
Transgressions such as these would prove appealing to Baltrop for the rest of his life.
The respected dance and theater photographer Max Waldman also attended and took
photographs of Dionysus in 69 and included them in his 1972 photobook Waldman on Theater.
(Figure 4.14) I believe Waldman would also prove to be an important artistic inspiration to
Baltrop. Baltrop’s archive contains a copy of the book, and Baltrop once decorated his locker
with another photo from the book, from a truly frightening series documenting Peter Weiss’ play
Marat/Sade showing an inmate of an insane asylum bound in rags.667 (It is not known which
particular frame Baltrop owned, but it could have been one of the following images.) (Figures
4.15-4.17) In his photographs of Dionysus in 69, bodies emerge from the gloaming -- or parts of
bodies: a shoulder, a thigh -- only to plunge back in, obscured by darkness or the tangle of
thrusting, orgiastic limbs. Any hint of contemporary politics, and even much of a sense of sexual
difference, is gone, leaving only flesh writhing in agony and ecstasy, as if in thrall to some grim
biological imperative. Given the extremely limited personal space a sailor had for himself on a
ship, one imagines Baltrop would have reserved it for only his most meaningful pieces of art.
Indeed, partly veiled sex scenes similar to these would become a touchstone of Baltrop’s own
work.
The other photographs Baltrop hung in his locker were both staged portraits of Yukio
Mishima. The enfant terrible of postwar Japanese literature, Mishima lived and wrote about the
666 See Richard Schechner, “Collective Reflexivity: Restoration Of Behavior.” In A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive
Perspectives in Anthropology, edited by Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby, 39-81. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
667 “On one door, I had a picture of Yukio Mishima. The Japanese author, film director who committed suicide. He
had his head cut off, and he was gay. There was a famous picture of him doing Sebastian. He fell in love, when he
was young with Sebastian, the Saint. And he modeled himself in many respects after Sebastian. I had a picture of the
man (a photograph by Max Waldman from Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade) tied up in rags in the insane asylum from
that period of time. A scary-looking dude, his eyes were bugged out, and he was drooling at the mouth, and I had
these pictures on the wall.” See Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.”

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life of a gay aesthete before becoming, in middle age, a far-right Japanese nationalist who
committed seppuku (ritual suicide) after an outlandish and failed coup attempt. The faintly
ridiculous tenor of Mishima’s life was captured in separate portraits taken of him by Shinoyama
Kishin and Eikoh Hosoe in which he posed as (Christian martyr and later gay icon) Saint
Sebastian.668 Kishin’s portrait is the less interesting of the two, in part because of its credulous
presentation of Mishima’s sexy/heroic self-image. (Figure 4.18) Hosoe’s portrait, however, is
noteworthy for two reasons. Using the loose composition of a snapshot, he pulled the camera
back to humorously reveal the edges of the studio backdrop on which was painted a fauxRenaissance foliage motif. (Figure 4.19) Mishima is shown not with Sebastian’s expression of
sorrowful majesty but with the kind of neutral patience that settles over a photo shoot when, for
example, the assistant is changing film rolls. Hosoe’s photo formed the link for Baltrop to an
influential 1974 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called “New Japanese Photography,”
curated by John Szarkowski and the critic and magazine editor Shoji Yamagishi. Baltrop was
impressed enough by what he saw in that show, especially Hosoe’s photographs, that he
purchased the catalog, which was also found in his archive. In ultra-high contrast black and
white, Hosoe’s photos, taken from the 1959-1960 project Man and Woman, are abstract details
of two nude bodies. Whereas Hosoe’s portrait of Mishima pulls back the curtain, as it were, to
reveal the man behind the myth, his photographs in Man and Woman have no such penetrative
quality. Faces are often either cropped out (Figure 4.22) or printed with such contrast as to lose
668 Kishin represented Japan at the 1976 Venice Biennale with studies of Japanese architecture, and also
photographed celebrities, most famously Yoko Ono and John Lennon in Central Park. (Figure 4.20) Hosoe became a
pivotal figure in postwar Japanese photography by breaking with the dominant social documentary mode
exemplified by Ken Domon (Figure 4.21) and embracing a highly stylized, poetic, and dream-like form of fine art
photography. Ikuho Amano, “St. Sebastian Reborn: Greco-Roman Ideals of the Body in Mishima Yukio’s Postwar
Writing,” in Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia, ed. Xin Fan and Almut-Barbara Renger
(Boston: BRILL, 2018), 148. Ignacio Adriasola, “Japan's Venice: The Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and
the ‘Pseudo-Objectivity’ of the International,” Archives of Asian Art 67, no. 2 (2017): 226. Darwin Marable, “Eikoh
Hosoe: An Interview,” History of Photography 24, no. 1 (2000): 84-85.

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their identifying features. (Figure 4.23) The individuals who modeled for the camera are hidden
behind the supposedly all-encompassing binary named in the title (and the clearly figured
anatomical differences) an organizing principle whose formal corollary is located in the prints’
black and white tones. The themes of revelation, demonstrated by Hosoe’s portrait of Yukio
Mishima, and concealment, demonstrated by Man and Woman, would also mark Baltrop’s future
work at the piers.
In 1969, Baltrop was drafted and served as a medic in the Navy. (Although, since his
ship, the USS William V. Pratt, was stationed in the Mediterranean for the duration of his
deployment, he was careful to call himself a “Vietnam-era veteran” instead of a “Vietnam
veteran.”)669 Baltrop was in boot camp when word came of the riot at the Stonewall Inn, the
dingy, mob-run gay bar he and his friends used to frequent. His friends mailed him clippings that
mentioned their involvement in the historic event.670 Like every other gay person serving their
country, often at risk of injury or death, Baltrop had to conceal his sexuality from his superiors
upon pain of dismissal. It was not until a year in the Navy that he said, “I learned that I could be
a whole person,” by opening up to fellow gay sailors. Armed with a homemade enlarger and
developing trays made from repurposed medical equipment, Baltrop photographed suggestive
scenes of male desire.671
One photograph shows three young black sailors standing in a group outside, perhaps on
the deck of the ship. (Figure 4.24) A sweet-faced man on the right sticks his tongue out and to
the right and looks at the camera. Is he acting silly for the camera? Or making a sexual gesture?
669 Cotter, “He Captured a Clandestine Gay Culture Amid the Derelict Piers.” Jesse Dorris, “Down and Out on the
West Side Piers,” Aperture, October 24, 2019, https://aperture.org/editorial/life-and-times-alvin-baltrop; Wilcox,
“Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.” 670 “Piers Alvin Baltrop,” 36. 671 Ibid.

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It is not clear, and the other two men’s expressions could also be read in multiple ways. Are the
two men stifling a laugh and shooting the first man a skeptical look, respectively, because of the
man’s innocence or because of his sinfulness? In the explicitly homophobic atmosphere of the
armed forces, plausible deniability was key. Another photograph taken from a high vantage point
on board a ship shows a young sailor, small in the frame, standing in his underwear with his back
to the camera surrounded by a thicket of pipes, wires, and ship gadgetry. (Figure 4.25) Surely, he
is only sunbathing; sexual activity out in the open would have gotten him a one-way ticket home.
What would have been less sure, at least to a commanding officer if he had gotten hold of
Baltrop’s photo, is the intention of the photographer. Is this a snapshot meant to show his family
back home what his new workplace looked like? Is it a gadget nerd’s appreciation of the ship’s
technology? Or is it a study of light and form? Or of an attractive and fit young man’s semi-nude
body? This kind of ambiguity would run through Baltrop’s later pier photographs.
Upon leaving the service, Baltrop used his G.I. bill benefits to enroll in New York’s
School of Visual Arts in 1973, where he studied photography under Walter Silver, William
Broeker, and David Burnstein.672 The struggle to attend class while working and pursuing his
own photography projects led him to drop out in 1975, and he began working as a cab driver.
(Figure 4.26) Like a latter-day Weegee, Baltrop bought a police radio, and on his work breaks,
would use it to find and photograph crime scenes. It was on one of these trips that Baltrop came
upon the ruined West Side piers.673 Initially frightened by the darkened structures and what they
might hold, Baltrop credits Alice, the white fellow cab driver he was dating and living with at the
672 Jacqueline “Pif” Hoffner, Executive Assistant to the President, School of Visual Arts, email to the author,
October 6, 2023.
673 Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” 120.

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time, with pushing him to continue shooting there.674 (Figure 4.27) Baltrop photographed at the
piers, day in and day out, from 1975 to 1986, even living out of a van -- loaded up with cameras,
film, wine, joints, food, several knives, and a gun -- along the water’s edge for days or weeks at a
time.675 Alice accompanied Baltrop a few times, sunbathing while he was off shooting, in what
curator Lia Gangitano described as “the pair’s idiosyncratic interpretation of urban
picnicking.”676
Baltrop’s Pier Photos
While some of his images show explicit scenes of male nudity, (Figure 4.28) many offer
a less clear picture of cruising culture. Baltrop created these gaps in the record throughout his
process, starting before he released the shutter and ending only later in the darkroom.
Baltrop frequently chose to place himself at a great distance from his subject before
shooting. Sometimes this involved wearing a homemade harness so he could hang high up in the
rafters.677 At other times, as in this photograph, it simply meant that he stayed on ground level
near the perimeter of the pier. (Figure 4.29)
In other photographs, Baltrop used a telephoto lens and, by delicately adjusting his
camera position and posture, arranged the industrial detritus in his viewfinder into a dense
thicket around his subjects. (Figure 4.30) While René Burri also used telephoto lenses to
674 Alvin and Alice were together from 1975 to 1980. Reminiscing to one interviewer, he acknowledged his “heavy
love for her.” Shortly after their relationship ended, Alvin met a man at the piers named Mark with whom he would
have a relationship for sixteen years. Alice and Mark -- whose last names are unknown -- both died of AIDS in the
1980s or 1990s. Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.” “Piers Alvin Baltrop,” 36. 675 Frame, 74; Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” 121. 676 Lia Gangitano, Dead Flowers: Charles Atlas, Alvin Baltrop, Genesis Breyer P-orridge, Timothy Carey, Johanna
Constantine, Marti Domination, Scott Ewalt, Georg Gatsas, Brandon Olson, Kembra Pfahler, Cynthia Plaster
Caster, Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian), Paul Thek (Philadelphia: Vox Populi and New York: PARTICIPANT INC,
2011), 29.
677 Oliver, 67.

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compress foreground and background, he tended to shoot either down (Figure 4.31) or up,
(Figure 4.32) so the nearby elements did not overlap with and obstruct the faraway ones. To
make this image, on the other hand, Baltrop shot straight forward, thereby locking the viewer out
of the scene with a curtain of steel I-beams.
Baltrop also used value extremes to mask his subjects. One full-length portrait of a young
man shows him getting undressed in a shaft of brilliant light, half of his body in a kind of detailless solar radiance. (Figure 4.33) Another full-length portrait of a man naked except for his shoes
is cast into impenetrable blackness. (Figure 4.34) A closer look at this photograph, however,
reveals that Baltrop deliberately “burned” -- or darkened -- the figure in the darkroom. Only the
very brightest parts of his body -- his clavicles and the front of his right thigh -- retain any
luminous detail. How do we know he did this? Perhaps the person is simply dark-skinned. Or
perhaps Baltrop closed the aperture or quickened the shutter in order to retain detail in the
blindingly bright river beyond -- thereby casting everything else into darkness. Both of those
things are probably true. But it is clear that Baltrop burned the print because the darkness of the
man’s body extends beyond its perimeter, darkening the water beyond him like a storm cloud.678
(Should anyone mistake Baltrop’s work for pornography, consider a key differentiating feature
of that genre: its complete absence of shadow.)679 (Figure 4.35)
Baltrop’s interventions continue even after the photo has been taken. One of Baltrop’s
photographic prints (or perhaps the negative) goes under the knife at one point. (Figure 4.36) An
intact version of the print shows automobiles parked at water’s edge, with a pier and Lower
678 That is no knock on Baltrop’s technical skills. Burning in such an intricate shape by variously exposing and
shielding the photographic paper to light using only one’s hands would be exceedingly difficult. One might instead
consider cutting out the figure of the man from a second print and using what is left to mask the light. 679 William Sharpe, Grasping Shadows: The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 219.

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Manhattan visible beyond. In a second version of the print, the pale skyline, the sliver of water’s
edge, and most dramatically, the pier have vanished, having been carefully cut out to reveal the
paper-white backing. The vehicles -- one of which is a sightseer’s campervan -- appear to have
lined up at a precipice, as if to gawk at the Grand Canyon, only to find that someone has hidden
it from view. Baltrop, in other words, accomplished his obfuscations not only in the camera, but
also later, in the darkroom. This last technique underscores the opacity of the photographic
image in the art historical sense, as well. By foregrounding the physicality of the print, Baltrop
disrupts the traditional photographic infrastructure, reminding the viewer that they are not
looking through a window onto historical truth but at a human-made representation thereof.
This was not how other photographers made photos of the piers. On evenings and
weekends, a lawyer for the New York City Transit Authority named Leonard Fink donned denim
cutoffs and roller skates, picked up his camera, and glided through the West Village taking
photos.680 He had taught himself photography and used an old 35mm camera and a darkroom he
had built in his humble apartment, which overflowed with the photographic supplies he would
buy in bulk.681 By the time he died of AIDS-related complications in 1993, his body of work
consisted of more than 25,000 negatives and four feet of boxes filled with black and white
prints.682 Focusing on the West Village gay bars and piers, as well as Pride marches (including
the first ever in 1970), his photos were later donated to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and
Transgender Community Center in New York City.683 Yet within this fairly narrow topic range,
Fink shows remarkable diversity. One of the naughtier photographs shows a naked man
680 Anderson, 30. 681 “Leonard Fink Photographs,” Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York,
accessed July 2, 2024, https://gaycenter.org/archive-collection/leonard-fink-photographs. 682 Ibid. 683 Ibid.

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straddling an oil drum and mirroring a pornographic mural on the wall behind him. (Figure 4.37)
Another photograph is a careful formal study of a ruined pier, its spidery angles liquified in the
reflections on the water below. (Figure 4.38) Another photograph captures the grey muck of a
New York afternoon and the men willing to brave it to stand outside their bar. (Figure 4.39) One
photograph is an arty figure study in which the subject’s young, healthy body is contrasted with
the decay and collapse of the pier around him (an image which would take on tragic new
meanings in the years to come.) (Figure 4.40) A final photograph, taken of two men sitting naked
on a pier, gazing at a passing ship, has all the sweetness and poignancy of a “maiden voyage”
photograph taken at the turn of the century. (Figure 4.41) Fink’s rich, multi-layered photographs
reveal a community as seen by an insider willing to spend decades searching for it. They seem to
be the photo negative of Baltrop’s obscured images of the same subject matter. Or perhaps not.
In truth, the negatives and prints rarely left the filing cabinet in his apartment.684 They were
never exhibited or published in his lifetime. Only a few very close friends ever saw any of
them.685 Perhaps Baltrop and Fink were actually both protecting the piers from prying eyes.
It is common to hear people describe Baltrop as a “documentarian.” One text written by
architect Viola Ago in conversation with scholar Jack Halberstam implicitly frames Baltrop as an
adjunct to, and documentarian of, artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s intervention there.686 Sergio
Bessa, who curated an exhibition of Baltrop’s work at the Bronx Museum in 2020, has described
Baltrop’s photographs as “probably the most extensive documentation of how the piers looked at
that time.”687 (Emphasis added) Artist and art historian Jonathan Weinberg has written that
684 Ibid. 685 Ibid. 686 Viola Ago, “An Aesthetic of Collapse: Alternative Form, Disorder and Indeterminacy: A Conversation with Jack
Halberstam,” Architectural Design 92, no. 2 (2022): 119. 687 Emma Grillo, “How Alvin Baltrop Captured the Intimate Queer History of Manhattan’s West Side Piers,”
Interview, August 5, 2019, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/alvin-baltrop-bronx-museum.

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Baltrop was one of several photographers “intent on making a direct record” of the piers and
their male visitors.688 (Emphasis added)
Yet there is very little that is “direct” about Baltrop’s work. Baltrop’s tendency to place
his subjects small in the frame, a firm negation of photojournalist Robert Capa’s famous dictum,
“if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough,” is widely noted, and widely
misinterpreted.689 Some commentators do not read the photographs as distant shots of cruising
men, but rather as architectural studies that happen to contain cruising.690 But if figuring ruin was
the goal, why bother including cruisers at all, and why focus only on the piers, when much of
New York was in ruin? Others argue that the mix of distant and close up shots simply index
Baltrop’s journey over time from distant observer to intimate participant -- although the lack of
dates on his prints make this impossible to prove.691 Perhaps the distant shots offer subjects a
measure of privacy.692 Baltrop certainly understood that closeted cruisers in particular faced real
danger from exposure.693 (As David Wojnarowicz put it in a diary entry, “although it’s public
sex ya still have the sense that ya should respect their privacy and not go over and watch, though
688 Jonathan Weinberg, “City-Condoned Anarchy,” in The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront, ed.
Jonathan Weinberg with Darren Jones (New York: Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 2012), 2. 689 Scholars have written about veiled or partial photographic picturing in other contexts, such as Robert Capa’s
photographs of war. Proximity was not the only strategy Capa deployed to make convincing photographs in
warzones. As Thierry Gervais notes, the blurriness, truncated figures, and unusual framing of his images became
part of an “editorial strategy” for the Picture Post to transmit a sense of unrehearsed urgency to viewers. (That
strategy does not explain Baltrop’s own version of obscured picturing, because the dark and unstable piers
demanded cautious treading rather than heart-pounding flight.) In the same edited volume in which Gervais’ essay
appears, Sarah Kelleher links the nearly illegible, grainy, and enshadowed photographs of Daido Moriyama to
postwar Japanese “willed amnesia.” Thierry Gervais, “Reaching Beyond the Index: The Publication of News
Photographs,” in Photography and Doubt, ed. Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York:
Routledge, 2017), 96. Sarah Kelleher, “Atomization, Anomie, and Farewell to Photography,” in Photography and
Doubt, ed. Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York: Routledge, 2017), 189. 690 Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier, The Gotham Center For New York City History, “Desire &
Documentary in the Photography of Alvin Baltrop,” accessed October 29, 2023,
https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/alvin-baltrops-documentary-intimacy 691 Gracie Hadland, “Alvin Baltrop’s Perilous Haven for Queer Expression,” Frieze 218 (April 2021):
https://www.frieze.com/article/alvin-baltrop-hannah-hoffman-2021-review. 692 Grillo, “How Alvin Baltrop Captured the Intimate Queer History of Manhattan’s West Side Piers.” 693 “Piers Alvin Baltrop,” 36.

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watching from a discreet distance can only be expected as it is an intense visual to be
confronted.”)694 Perhaps these photographs require, as one observer suggests, “an active
engagement on the part of the viewer, who is thus made solely responsible for what they choose
to see.”695 The photos act as a test, in other words, of our culturally-inflected vision of the world,
challenging us to acknowledge the existence of gay men at a time of rampant homophobia. But
both of these explanations fail to account for the photos Baltrop made closer to the subject, in
which the subject’s identity and sexual preference are clear. One writer argues that Baltrop’s
photos “use distance and light to throw the act of observing into relief.”696 That is not necessarily
wrong, but if that were Baltrop’s primary goal, why would he have limited himself to the piers?
New York City, home to dark canyons, soaring skyscrapers, and wide-open parks, is full to the
brim with photographic opportunities to limn space.
A better version of this argument holds that the distant photos recreate in the viewer the
“scopophilic desire” of a man cruising for sex.697 Although to call Baltrop a “voyeur,” is at best
only partially correct. That word’s connotation of desirous looking without ethical commitment
fails to describe Baltrop, who was known to care for the young men who had been kicked out of
their homes, encourage cruisers to get tested for STDs, and gave relationship advice.698 As he
recalled in an interview, “I knew these people. They’d see me everyday. Some people took off
their clothes and demanded to be photographed.”699 The poem he had written on his camera bag
uses the plural “we” six times, implying solidarity under fire (“In time we all hope for freedom
694 Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz, 156. 695 Francesco Gagliardi, “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop,” Brooklyn Rail, February 2020,
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/02/artseen/The-Life-and-Times-of-Alvin-Baltrop. 696 Kate Green, "Alvin Baltrop," Art Papers Magazine 36, no. 6 (November/December 2012): 55. 697 Laura McLean-Ferris, “Alvin Baltrop Galerie Buchholz,” Artforum 56, no. 2 (October 2017): 244. 698 Green, 55; Nadja Sayej, “Alvin Baltrop: Remembering New York's Forgotten Queer Photographer,” Guardian,
August 19, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/aug/18/alvin-baltrop-remembering-new-yorksforgotten-queer-photographer. 699 “Piers Alvin Baltrop,” 36.

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or just to die…”) rather than the voyeur’s binary worldview of subject and object.700 Baltrop’s
interests also ranged beyond the visual, as evidenced by the many oral histories he recorded at
the piers.701 As his artistic drive and physical ability to photograph declined in the mid-1980s, his
commitment to the community remained strong, and he advocated for those living with
HIV/AIDS.702 Even if, hypothetically, Baltrop had made the work out of scopophilic desire, the
work’s meaning changed radically for him as more and more men he knew passed away. “I'm to
the point where I don't even like to look at these photographs a lot of the time because there's too
many stories involved with them. You understand what I'm saying? There are so many
stories.”703
Scholar Richard Meyer’s analysis of an early Robert Mapplethorpe photo collage entitled
“Bull’s Eye” provides what could be the strongest alternative explanation to the one I propose.
(Figure 4.42) At the center of the collage is a photograph of a nude white man wearing tall
leather boots, arms by his side and feet apart, facing the camera. Layered on top of and around
the photo are design elements including two sections of black perforated material similar to a
chain link fence to his left and right, a thick black horizontal bar covering the man’s face, and a
translucent yellow rectangle and a smaller red circle covering his genitals. In Meyer’s reading,
the work mixes the upright, law-abiding image adopted by homophile organizations of the 1950s
and 60s with the revolutionary imagery of the liberationists of the 1960s and 70s -- it both
conceals and reveals.704 But Mapplethorpe does not do this simply to pay homage to a previous
generation’s media strategy. Instead, Meyer argues, the artist does this to make the work feel
700 Wilcox, “The History That Alvin Baltrop Left Behind,” 119. 701 Oliver, 68. 702 Ibid. 703 Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.” 704 Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality In Twentieth-Century American Art
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 168.

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kinky. It “welcomes, even solicits, a fantasy of full frontal exposure” at the same time as it
pretends to enact stern censorship.705 Mapplethorpe’s collage takes direction from the
commercially-available male pornography of the time. That imagery was required by law to
conceal the genitals of its subjects, and as Foucault had predicted in The History of Sexuality, it
was therefore celebrated by viewers for introducing a highly stimulating act of suppression.706
Crucial to Meyer’s argument, however, was the fact that the censored pornographic images (and
Mapplethorpe’s self-censored fine art piece) “compensated” for the obfuscations elsewhere.707 In
one photograph from a 1958 issue of Art and Physique, the male model wears a codpiece
covered in jewels and erupting in floor-length silk, while a profusion of paper flowers covers the
wall behind him. (Figure 4.43) Mapplethorpe uses a raking light to throw the nude model’s
musculature into relief, and depicts him wearing tall leather boots, evoking the leather-clad
world of S&M. The model stands at attention with the coiled potential energy of a parading
soldier, ready and willing. The yellow and red overlays around his groin (which have all the
subtlety and intellectual heft of a traffic light) are teasingly close to turning green. The black
“chain link fence” and the black rectangle placed over the model’s eyes are meant to evoke
imprisonment and police photography of criminal suspects -- even if they have a clean, die-cut
appearance a world away from the grubby look of actual New York City jails.708 (Figure 4.44)
Perhaps Baltrop’s formal obfuscations play a similar role, but there are reasons to doubt
this. Mapplethorpe’s binding of the conservative homophilic aesthetic with the ecstatic liberatory
aesthetic points to a similar dynamic of suppression and explosion which played out in his
personal life. Growing up in a rigid, strictly Catholic family, the young Mapplethorpe once told a
705 Meyer 171. 706 Meyer 176. 707 Meyer 171. 708 Meyer 174.

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neighboring child, “there’s this clock in Hell that chimes every hour, ‘You will never get
out…you will never get out…you will never get out.’”709 Yet in his adult life he seemed to relish
transgression at every turn. It does not appear Baltrop experienced such a dramatic change.
Although he and his religiously devout mother feuded when he was young, correspondence
between them in which he was very open about his sexual identity suggests a more even keel.710
More importantly, Baltrop’s work lacks the “compensatory” appeal of “Bull’s Eye.”
Baltrop’s photographs do not evoke the look of New York’s jails, either, but -- at their most
bleak -- the crime scene preceding them. One photograph shows the lower half of a man’s naked
body lying flat on a tar and gravel roof strewn with debris. (Figure 4.45) Strong diagonal lines
created by surrounding architecture careen into and near him, but none with the stern finality of
the blackened wooden wall bisecting the body. The distance between photographer and subject
recalls the one imposed by yellow police tape around a crime scene, or suggests a photographer’s
deference to public taste, or to the dignity of the dead. What awaits the viewer, in other words, is
not a sexy “reveal” but something one will likely regret having seen. In fact, Baltrop’s
photograph is not too dissimilar to one taken of Gambino family head Paul Castellano lying dead
outside a restaurant on East 46th Street on December 16, 1985 and published in the Times the
following day.711 (Figure 4.46) (Although the photographer shot the scene with a wide-enough
angle lens to capture detectives milling about and some vehicles in the background, (Figure 4.47)
the Times cropped the image to focus on Castellano’s legs and the heavy black car door
obstructing the view of his upper body. ) There would have been plenty of opportunities for
709 Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995), chap. 1, E-book. 710 Oliver, 66. 711 The Times cropped the original photograph to only include the body, the car door, and the pavement. Selwyn
Raab, “Authorities Foresee Power Struggle,” New York Times, December 17, 1985, B4. Photograph of assassinated
mafia boss Paul Castellano taken by Ruby Washington for the New York Times.

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Baltrop to see news photos of covered bodies; throughout the 1970s, amongst mafiosi alone,
Joseph A. Colombo, Sr., the head of the Colombo crime family, was killed in 1971, Joseph
Gallo, a member of that same family, was killed in 1972, and Carmine Galante, a major figure in
the Gambino family, was killed in 1979.712
Even Baltrop’s photographs without these morbid associations are more prosaic than
pleasurable. One photograph shows a figure standing in a thicket of wooden two-by-fours framed
into a structure of ambiguous purpose. (Figure 4.48) At one story in height, the structure lacks
both the cathedral-like grandeur of the original, erect piers, and the dark romance of the fallen
sheds, devastated by fire. Instead, its mass-produced two-by-fours evoke the quotidian,
workmanlike architecture of suburban housing. At least as shown in this particular frame, the
figure holds little sex appeal. In fact, with their face turned away, much of their body obscured
by clothing and structure, and an indeterminate style of hair and clothing, their biological sex is
unknowable. While Mapplethorpe screens the virile male nude in “Bull’s Eye” with visual
elements from the carceral state, Baltrop screens a fully-clothed person of unknown sex with
what looks like the early stages of a kitchen renovation.
In a final example, not only does the environment not “compensate” for the occlusion of
the figure, but in fact the figure’s primary role in the photograph seems to be to serve the
photographer’s representation of the environment. Shot inside Pier 52, presumably while
standing on a flat roof truss close to shore, the photograph provides a wide-angle view of MattaClark’s “Day’s End.” (Figure 4.49) By including a human figure in the frame, Baltrop found a
classic photographic solution to capturing the scale of such a large space (it measured roughly
712 Sarah Mervosh and Matt Stevens, “A Look at 5 High-Profile Mob Hits Before the Frank Cali Slaying,” New York
Times, March 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/nyregion/famous-mob-hits.html.

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600 feet long by 70 feet wide, with clerestory windows 50 feet up.)713 And by either posing that
figure or waiting for one to walk into the beam of afternoon light, not only does Baltrop locate
the signature effect of Matta-Clark’s art installation for his viewers, but he also demonstrates the
installation’s sacral appeal.714 While the figure is partly obscured by the trusses, screening is not
the source of pleasure in this image, but rather the art installation shown -- aided by the presence
of the human figure. Instead of the various theories detailed above, I believe Baltrop used formal
strategies of obfuscation to resist -- or muddy, or misdirect, or block -- the controlling gaze of
outsiders, whether that meant successful white artists, the law, or fellow African Americans.
First, let us consider the sinister taxonomic gaze that a successful white artist trained on
queer black men of Baltrop’s time, and the ethical implications of Baltrop’s body of work when
considered as a deliberately incomplete archive. At first glance, “incomplete” seems to be the
last word one would choose to describe Baltrop’s body of work. His dedication to the piers
project is remarkable. He spent over a decade photographing them and their visitors, camping out
in a van nearby for days or weeks at a time -- even though he had his own apartment just over a
mile away in the East Village, an apartment which became increasingly glutted with boxes of
prints and rolls of film.715 The fact that, if one were to uproot and gather all those old piers side
by side, one would only end up with an area the size of a very small town makes his obsession
all the more clear. Baltrop’s work forms the most complete body of photographs of the piers in
existence, but as the previous section explains, it is an incomplete body in very important,
intentional ways. Furthermore, many of Baltrop’s prints are technically imperfect. Light leaks,
713 Lee, 119. 714 Matta-Clark compared the pier to “an enormous Christian basilica” and the cut he made on the west wall to a
“rose window.” As someone who attended the opening recalled, “it reminded me of the first moments of seeing a
Michelangelo, of being in a cathedral with flying buttresses and light-stained glass.” Lee, 127, 130. 715 Oliver, 67; Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.”

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over- and underexposure, and tears show up frequently. This cannot be chalked up to Baltrop’s
poverty. After all, his contemporary, Peter Hujar, who also cruised and photographed at the
piers, embraced, in Jed Perl’s words, a “penurious lifestyle…with an almost aristocratic
aplomb”716 -- and yet produced flawless prints. (Figure 4.50)
Prying Eyes
There is a different archive, similarly vast as Baltrop’s, that has no such gaps, that feels,
instead, like its author has mapped and palpated every crevice of difference and rendered legible
every iota of his subjects in a taxonomy of photographic prints that are -- literally -- perfect.
Robert Mapplethorpe, a white man from Queens two years older than Baltrop, enjoyed enormous
success in the New York art market, courting controversy for, among other things, his nude
photos of black men -- a reflection of an unusually intense sexual obsession. (Figure 4.51)
Patricia Morrisroe’s biography explains how. Mapplethorpe visited a working-class black gay
bar at least four nights a week, often with two highly cultured white friends in tow, John Abbott,
formerly of Sonnabend Gallery in Paris, and Winthrop Edey, an art historian and antique clock
expert. Together, the three talked constantly about the sexual allure of, as Mapplethorpe
frequently and openly called them, “niggers.”717 Edey’s careful and attentive description of black
flesh is revealing:
For one thing, the texture of a black man’s skin is different. The most beautiful
black bodies have a thin layer of fat all over them which gives an amazing
consistency to the musculature and to the surface of the body. Another thing about
black bodies at their best is the broadness of shoulders in proportion to the
narrowness of the hips. Then, of course, there’s the size of the cock. The average
716 Jed Perl, “Peter and His Kind,” New York Review of Books, April 5, 2018,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/peter-hujar-his-kind/ 717 Morrisroe, chap. 16.

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black cock is bigger. I don’t think people realize how hard Robert worked to find
the perfect one. He examined thousands and thousands of them.718
George Stambolian, a member of the gay literary scene at the time, once heard Mapplethorpe
comprehensively describe the ideal black penis down to the measurement of the tiny opening at
the tip. “Robert had drawn a picture of a penis on a chart,” Stambolian recalled, “and he was like
a surgeon, using medical terms like ‘corpus spongiosum.’ I was impressed by his dedication.”719
Mapplethorpe often sounded like a kind of animal breeder or tracker, and not simply because he
referred to black men as “gorillas” who could be “caught” with cocaine as bait.720 He had
thoughts on the way black men smelled and on the size of their lips, and on the supposed inverse
relationships between a specimen’s beauty and intelligence, and between their financial means
and racial purity.721 (His taxonomic impulse carried over to other species as well; his
comprehensive studies of flowers constitute Mapplethorpe’s more commercially-friendly body
of work.) (Figure 4.52)
Kobena Mercer writes that Mapplethorpe’s subject matter “is given heightened allure by
his evident mastery of photographic technology.”722 The photographs may have allure to some,
but it is no way due to Mapplethorpe’s technological mastery. Mapplethorpe did not take light
readings in order to know the correct aperture and shutter speed at which to set his camera, and
he did not make Polaroids to test his setup before the shoot began; instead he just cranked up his
light and set his aperture to f/16.723 The flawless prints for which he was known (one reviewer
wrote, “the grain of each photograph looks burnished, as if it were possible to polish silver oxide
718 Ibid. 719 Ibid. 720 Ibid. 721 Ibid. 722 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994),
173.
723 Morrisroe, chap. 18.

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with a hand tool”724) were made by someone else, with infrequent input from the
photographer.725 Regardless, it is the flawlessness of those prints that matters here, for they
exude mastery of both the craft and of the subjects depicted. This second form of mastery is
accomplished in other ways, too, and here, Mercer’s argument is more helpful. Borrowing Homi
Bhabha’s notion of “fixity,” Mercer argues that Mapplethorpe “fixes” his black male subjects in
rigid and depersonalizing fantasies of the white gay male subject, sometimes by isolating
attractive bodily details, but at all times by isolating the black subject from other black subjects,
thereby “foreclos[ing] the possible representation of a collective or contextualized black male
body” and ensuring total domination by the photographer.726 (Figure 4.53) When applied to the
black body, the classicism of Mapplethorpe’s photography -- its formal restraint and idealism, its
marble-like white skin and bronze-like black skin -- indicates approval, but entirely on the terms
of (what people of Mapplethorpe’s day widely considered) Greek “whiteness.”727 (Figure 4.54)
According to Peter L’Official, Baltrop “personally despised” Robert Mapplethorpe.728 The two
may have crossed paths at The Bar, where Baltrop worked as a bouncer and Mapplethorpe came
to drink.729 “Mapplethorpe was an asshole,” Baltrop recalled. “He walked up to me one evening
and said, ‘If you pose for me, I’ll give you fifty dollars and a gram of coke.’ I said, ‘If you pose
for me, I’ll give you a decent fucking portfolio for yourself.’”730
724 Kay Larson, “Between a Rock and a Soft Place,” New York, June 1, 1981, 58. 725 Morrisroe, chap. 16. 726 See Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. 727 Because the polychromy of Greek statuary rarely survives intact, the objects often appear white in the present
day. This has led to a widespread belief that racially white people in the present can lay claim to the Greeks as their
illustrious forebears. In truth, such concepts of race did not exist in the Greek’s time. See Tim Whitmarsh, “Black
Achilles.” Aeon, May 9, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisioned-achilles-did-he-see-a-black-man.
Morrisroe, chap. 16.
728 Peter L’Official, “On the Waterfront: Peter L’Official on David Hammons’s Day’s End,” Artforum 59, no. 7
(May 2021): 42.
729 Frame, 75. 730 Mia Kang, “Things That I Considered Beautiful: Reflections on the Alvin Baltrop Archive,” in The Life and
Times of Alvin Baltrop, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa (Milan: Skira, 2020), 84.

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To better understand Baltrop’s ethical accomplishment and Mapplethorpe’s failure, one
might compare their bodies of work to a project titled Fish Story made by the photographer and
writer Allan Sekula starting in 1989 (admittedly, several years after Baltrop made his own work.)
Part of a larger trilogy that reflected the author’s hard-left concerns about US Cold War
aggression and industrial relations, Fish Story is a sprawling photographic meditation on
globalization that attempts to render visible the precarious labor enabling so-called “friction-free
capitalism” as well as the human and architectural wreckage left behind in the wake of
deindustrialization -- all at a time in which the post-Soviet world rejoined the world economy,
East Asia began its rise to industrial might, borders opened to trade, and corporations
consolidated power globally.731 (Figures 4.55-4.57) One might be tempted to ask what the book
is not about. But, as Bill Roberts argues in an essay on Fish Story, one should not be tempted to
mistake its ambition for mastery.
732 In Roberts’ admiring take, Sekula is deliberately resisting
easy summations or solutions to the problems of modern capitalism by employing an unwieldy
range of photographic types, from microscopic to panorama, and textual references, from Moby
Dick to Robert Smithson’s 1967 essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.”
Workers are never celebrated as heroic types but are rather (in an uncanny similarity to the men
in Baltrop’s photographs) “often absent, obscured or incidental, sometimes central, mostly at
work on specific tasks, and occasionally dwarfed by some hulking industrial apparatus.”733 As it
does with Baltrop’s oeuvre, photographic quality varies, generally landing somewhere between,
as Benjamin Buchloh puts it, the “‘deskilling’ aesthetic of the snapshot” and the “professional
731 See Allan Sekula. Fish Story. Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002. 732 Bill Roberts, “Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism,” Tate Papers
18 (Autumn 2012): 17, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/18/production-in-view-allan-sekulas-fish-storyand-the-thawing-of-postmodernism 733 Ibid.

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artisanal photograph.”734 All of this is in service of what Roberts calls “Sekula’s deflation of
conceptual mastery,” a strategy that prevents his pictures being read as “the passive illustration
of immutable historical forces.”735 After all, to borrow from Marx, the point is not to know the
world but to change it. Both of these years-long projects, intimately tied to piers and harbor life,
implicitly reject the kind of assumption of sovereignty Mapplethorpe displayed in his portraits of
gay black men.
Scrutiny also came to the piers in the form of the cinema. William Friedkin’s 1980 film
“Cruising” starred Al Pacino as a police officer who goes undercover in New York’s waterfrontadjacent S&M scene to catch a murderer. (Figure 4.57) The culprit stabs his victims to death
during sex, and as Pacino’s character experiences a crisis of sexual identity, it is implied that he,
too, develops a murderous streak.736 Although Friedkin and Pacino identified as straight, the
director told the press that he had sought a high degree of accuracy in his portrayal of this
community.737 Just like the character, Friedkin himself went undercover, visiting a S&M club in
order to do research while wearing only a jockstrap and accompanied by an armed bodyguard.738
Indeed, since Friedkin shot on location, using many over 500 local gay men as extras, the film’s
environments have a time-capsule quality which link it to Leonard Fink’s work described
above.739 Yet despite paying close attention to surfaces, many critics of the time argued that the
film failed to truly grasp gay New York. Vincent Canby wrote in the Times that although the film
734 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Allan Sekula: Photography Between Discourse and Document,” in Fish Story, by
Allan Sekula (Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002), 198.
735 Roberts, 23. 736 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 237. 737 Bernard Weinraub, “Film; Friedkin Tries Again for the A-List,” New York Times, April 2, 2000,
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/02/movies/film-friedkin-tries-again-for-the-a-list.html. Gillian Brockell, “Al
Pacino, Charlie Chaplin and History’s Most Famous Old Dads,” Washington Post, June 1, 2023,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/01/dad-al-pacino-baby-robert-de-niro. Vito Russo, “‘Cruising’:
The Controversy Continues,” New York, August 13, 1979, 46. 738 D. A. Miller, “Cruising,” Film Quarterly 61, no. 2 (December 2007): 70. 739 Ibid. Anderson, 152.

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“describes the s. and m. scene with…leering attention to detail…it makes no attempt to
comprehend it. It just stares.”740 Scholar D.A. Miller wrote that “the shots cast an almost
blinding illumination on a sexuality that had been so far much more in shadow as to be, until
now, cinematically invisible.”741 When it does try to get below the surface, things only get
worse. By portraying gay men as homicidal -- a common myth rehashed in Hollywood films
going back at least as far as Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1948) and “Strangers on a Train” (1951) -- the
film spurred furious protests from within the gay community and beyond.742 As one extra in the
film later told the press, “I felt very grimy about what I’d been involved in…the people
portrayed are so sleazy that I can’t imagine anyone caring if people like that get killed.”743 The
film was released in February of 1980. In November, a former Transit Authority police officer
named Ronald Crumpley opened fire with a stolen Uzi submachine gun on a group of men
waiting outside two gay bars near the waterfront.744 “I’ll kill them all -- the gays,” he said upon
his arrest. “They ruin everything.”745 It is not known if Crumpley had seen the film Cruising
before committing the crime. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to
psychiatric hospitals.746
If Baltrop had to be wary of artists such as Mapplethorpe and Friedkin, he had to be
especially wary of the law -- and here, the stakes were much higher. Anna Lvovsky’s Vice Patrol
Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall explains the rise of police
surveillance of homosexuals in the US. After several highly publicized attacks on young girls
740 Vincent Canby, “Screen: Pacino Stars in Friedkin’s ‘Cruising,’” New York Times, February 15, 1980, C6. 741 Miller, 70. 742 Miller, 70. 743 “Gays Denounce ‘Cruising,’” New York, July 23, 1979, 61. 744 Anderson, 153. 745 David W. Dunlap, “New York’s Own Anti-Gay Massacre, Now Barely Remembered,” New York Times, June 15,
2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/nyregion/new-yorks-own-anti-gay-massacre-now-barely-rememberedorlando.html.
746 Ibid.

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dating back to the 1930s, J. Edgar Hoover focused the nation’s attention on the supposed link
between male homosexuality and this form of criminality. In 1950, Senate Republicans tried to
tarnish the reputation of the Truman administration by stoking fears of a government infiltration
by homosexuals in the so-called “Lavender Scare.” Across this same decade, police departments
across the nation became more professionalized, developing specialized departments such as vice
squads. New “sexual psychopath” laws passed amidst sex-crime panics, made it possible for the
state to indefinitely confine and “treat” men convicted of even consensual gay sex. Other laws
updated sodomy prohibitions to include oral sex, and outlawed “solicitation,” the definition of
which would prove remarkably elastic.747 At the beginning of 1975, the year Baltrop began
shooting the piers, forty-two states defined sodomy as a crime.748
The police primarily used two tools: the decoy, or plainclothes cop, and hidden
surveillance of public toilets. Usually, decoys would lure in suspects with friendly banter or a
moment of exposed skin, but other times, they would study and learn to imitate common gay
patterns of tone, enunciation, physical gestures, and slang.749 Typically, poor and nonwhite
people bore the brunt of this surveillance.750 Hidden surveillance took several different forms, all
of them sordid, from one-way mirrors to fake air vents to peepholes. The cop hiding in the, well,
closet would witness innumerable men, both gay and straight, in their most private moments, and
by the 1960s, record them on camera, too.751 The most notorious example of this occurred in
747 Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2021), 5.
748 While most of these sodomy statutes criminalized this activity between different-sex partners, all of them
criminalized it between same-sex partners. Melinda D. Kane, “Timing Matters: Shifts in the Causal Determinants of
Sodomy Law Decriminalization, 1961–1998,” Social Problems 54, no. 2 (2007): 213-214. 749 Ibid 112. 750 Ibid 106. 751 Ibid 181 & 191.

177
1962 in Mansfield, Ohio, when police installed a one-way mirror and camera in a public toilet,
resulting in the convictions on sodomy charges of thirty-one men.752 (Figures 4.58-4.61)
Some of Baltrop’s Navy medical records are available in the Bronx Museum archive.
These include a note from a medical officer on board Baltrop’s ship sent to a psychiatrist at the
Jacksonville, Florida Naval Air Station, as well as that psychiatrist’s evaluation of Baltrop.753
Together, they sketch a picture of a young man wrestling with pressures and expectations around
sexuality that he would resolve through his long-term project on the New York piers. Baltrop’s
brittle, overcompensated persona, based on exaggerated racial traits and macho behavior, would
probably feel familiar to many men his age. Baltrop “is acutely aware of his race and uses it in
all his conversations,” wrote the medical officer.754 He is “grandiose” and tries to give the
impression of “unlimited ability to handle any and all of the problems that deal with people.”755
He says he learned all he knows about being a man from the “tough kids…on the street,” the
psychiatrist wrote.756 Part of that, presumably, was keeping a “flattened” affect, “with a
conscious effort to keep emotional responses under strict control.”757 When the medical officer
752 Should one be tempted to view this as a relic of an older, less tolerant era, consider that in 2002, the city of
Detroit agreed to pay $170,000 to six men and a gay rights organization after the men had been recently entrapped
by city police. If the targets of this entrapment had responded to the decoy with as much as a look that the decoy
perceived to be sexual, they were arrested and had their vehicle impounded. The men were forced to pay $900, plus
towing and storage costs, none of which was refunded even if charges were dismissed. James G. Hill, “Detroit to
Settle Rouge Park Gay Entrapment Suit,” Detroit Free Press, May 16, 2002, 1; “Detroit Settles ACLU Lawsuit
Challenging Police Sting Operation Against Gay Men,” ACLU of Michigan, July 23, 2002, accessed December 11,
2023, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/detroit-settles-aclu-lawsuit-challenging-police-sting-operation-againstgay-men
William E. Jones, Tearoom (Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons Publications, 2008), 32-34. 753 The medical referral began after Baltrop swallowed twelve tablets of the sedative Doriden, according to the
medical officer, “in order to show another man on the ship who was allegedly contemplating suicide what it might
be like” -- behavior the officer deemed “totally unreasonable.” Bomhard to Dr. Goldberg, Naval Air Station,
Jacksonville, January 31, 1972, The Alvin Baltrop Archive, Third Streaming, NY, and Galerie Buchholz,
Berlin/Cologne/New York.
754 Ibid. 755 Ibid. 756 Goldberg, [First name unknown. Medical doctor, Naval Air Station, Jacksonville,] Report on Alvin Baltrop,
February 7, 1972, The Alvin Baltrop Archive, Third Streaming, NY, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York.
757 Ibid.

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suggested Baltrop visit a psychiatrist, he flat out refused. “He is desparately [sic] fearful of
anyone ‘cracking my shell’ and finding out what is, in reality, his personality rather than the
facade he presently uses for defense.” Although Baltrop “denies interpersonal or heterosexual
problems, [he] does demonstrate an underlying need for reassurance and acceptance.”758
Baltrop came of age at the time of Black Power, a movement whose musical corollary
could be found in the work of hypermasculine and hypersexual black male singers such as James
Brown, Isaac Hayes, and Teddy Pendergrass.759 For many young black Americans, the vibe was,
in Michele Wallace’s term, “Black Macho.” The means were “ghetto cunning, cool, and
unrestrained sexuality;” the end was, simply, “revenge.”760 The stakes were high for artists who
had to maintain he-man personas, as Teddy Pendergrass discovered when he crashed his Rolls
Royce in March of 1982, and it came to light that his passenger was a trans woman named
Tenika Watson. Although she, unsurprisingly, bore the brunt of the public scrutiny and
humiliation which followed -- “the papers made me seem as though I was some kind of animal
or demon” -- Pendergrass endured, in Mark Anthony Neal’s words, a “symbolic fall from black
masculine ‘grace.’”761 (Figure 4.62) Baltrop’s self-inflation and defensiveness amidst this
758 Ibid. 759 Recall that Baltrop was of the same generation, and also photographed some of Malcolm X’s speeches. Mark
Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013),
143.
760 Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Warner Books, 1980), 58. 761 No community has a monolithic attitude towards gender and sexuality. For every Eldridge Cleaver -- the
increasingly unhinged founding member of the Black Panthers who once wrote that “homosexuality is a sickness,
just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors,” -- there was a Huey P. Newton -- his farsighted cofounder who would later exile Cleaver and encourage women and gays to join the struggle. For every
Amiri Baraka -- whose demented, homophobic poetry veers between silly and menacing -- there is a Ron Simmons -
- the academic willing to wrestle with the pig. And many more African Americans were simply fine with
homosexuality as long as it was kept quiet. bell hooks calls for further nuance when she argues that, within the
African American community, gay men, and especially those with financial resources, find greater acceptance than
gay women. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Delta, 1968), 110; Huey P. Newton, “On Eldridge Cleaver:
He Is No James Baldwin,” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader, ed. Devon Carbado
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), 315; Marlon Ross, Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit
Manliness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 239. See Ron Simmons, “Baraka’s Dilemma: To Be Or Not To
Be?” in Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader, ed. Devon Carbado. New York: New York
University Press, 1999. Craig Seymour, “‘Searching’ for Luther Vandross: The Politics and Performance of

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cultural moment suggest, at the very least, a mind fearful of scrutiny. Through his long, hard
work of shooting at the piers, Baltrop developed a way to admit scrutiny -- but on his own terms.
Glissant & Opacity
Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity might be helpful In thinking through Baltrop’s
photographic obfuscations. Glissant was born in Martinique, an overseas colony of France in
1928, eighteen years before France changed the island’s status to département and Martinicans
were granted full French citizenship.762 Coming from a tiny island on the edge of the Frenchspeaking world, in which the majority of inhabitants were the descendants of slaves whose own
histories had been erased, Glissant yearned for Martinique to break free, politically and
culturally, from mainland France and value its own identity.763 He studied at the Lycée
Schoelcher in Fort-de-France at a moment of intellectual ferment.764 Aimé Césaire, one of the
founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature, and a key proponent of
independence from France, taught at the school. Franz Fanon studied there, although he was four
years ahead of Glissant.765 Later, Glissant studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnography
in Paris’ Musée de l’Homme.766
Like Glissant, Baltrop was born into a country in which universal political rights were not
yet recognized (Baltrop would be 15 years old by the time the Civil Rights Act was passed.)
Studying an African-American Icon” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2005), 45. bell hooks,
“Homophobia in Black Communities,” in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality In Black Communities, ed. Delroy
Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001), 68. Neal, 155-156. 762 Li Chi-She, “Opacity,” Philosophy Today 63, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 860. Félix Germain, “A Black Panther in the
Tropics: Pierre-Just Marny and Martinique's Uneasy Transition from Colony to Overseas French Department,”
French Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (February 2019): 127. 763 Celia Britton, “Obituary: Edouard Glissant,” Guardian, February 13, 2011,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/13/edouard-glissant-obituary. 764 Chi-She, 860. 765 Ibid. 766 Ibid.

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Although there was no viable political independence movement for African Americans in
Baltrop’s time, opportunities for cultural independence from mainstream white America were
abundant. Baltrop owned several books about communism and socialism, including Mao’s Red
Book, as well as books about black magic.767 He drew mandalas and meditated; he decorated his
camera bag with a yin-yang symbol and swastikas. (Figure 4.63) In the Navy, his shipmates
nicknamed him “W.D.,” or witch doctor.768 Although Baltrop never had the opportunity to
pursue the kind of intellectual life Glissant had, they shared a sense of alienation from their
respective predominantly white and frequently oppressive governments.
Glissant began his 1981 book Le Discours Antillais with a vivid metaphor which Baltrop
literalized in his photographs. “In the north of the country,” Glissant wrote, “the knotted mass of
somber greens which the roads still do not penetrate. The maroons found refuge there.”769 The
“penetrating” road, of course, would have been colonial infrastructure, and on it would have
traveled the slave catchers -- if only the “knotted mass” had not prevented its extension and
hidden the escaped slaves. Thus, Glissant at first establishes opacity as a visible, physical tactic
to be employed in the oppressor/oppressed relationship during the days of colonial slavery, but
his real interest lies in the use of opacity as a kind of epistemological tactic in the present, postcolonial era. Glissant saw universalist humanism for what it was: a mere “hypothesis” of the
technologically and financially dominant Christian West that has been promoted to the level of
self-evident truth.770 Its seemingly progressive theory of difference -- which eschews hierarchy,
which holds one culture as neither better nor worse than any other but simply different --
767 Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.” 768 Ibid. 769 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996),
10.
770 Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]),
191.

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perversely opens the door to Glissant’s real enemy: transparency.771 Transparency is what is
demanded in return for eschewing hierarchy.772 The post-colonial subject must render themselves
transparent, or legible, to the Western subject, who will then weigh them on scales of his own
making, examining, reducing and finally incorporating them into his own worldview on his own
terms.773 (Consider again Mapplethorpe’s photograph “Ken Moody and Robert Sherman,” Figure
4.54, from 1984. The black and white heads, equally hairless and both positioned in profile, seem
to be prime candidates for craniometry.) Glissant makes his point with a rather sinister
etymological reading of the French word comprendre (“to understand”): “the movement of the
hands which take the surroundings and bring them back to oneself. [Which is a] gesture of
confinement if not of appropriation.”774 In response to this mental incursion, Glissant famously
writes, “we demand the right to obscurity,” the right to dwell in “stubborn shadows” and
“perpetual concealment, which is our form of resistance.”775 Whether or not Baltrop knew of
Glissant’s work, he literalizes the theorist’s ideas in his photographs of the enshadowed piers and
their frequently obscured denizens.
Scholars have written about forms of subaltern veiling in post-colonial scenarios before.
Christopher Pinney’s “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Post-Colonialism, and
Vernacular Modernism” posits that photographers in certain cultures of post-colonial India,
771 Glissant is speaking about transparency of the subaltern. Transparency in government has been widely considered
a virtue since the days of Jeremy Bentham, who argued that it was fundamentally important to the democratic goal
of holding one’s leaders to account. See Nicole Simek, “Stubborn Shadows,” symploke 23, no. 1-2 (2015): 364. 772 Glissant objected to the one-sided nature of the transparency operation in question, but it need not be so. In Jean
Starobinski’s reading of Rousseau, the state of total transparency, in which every subject is transparent to every
other, is presented as an ideal state of nature. That state has been destroyed by layers of mediation, he argues, such
as language, which permit the growth of civilization but which close souls off from each other. See Robert Darnton,
“A Star Is Born,” review of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, by Jean Starobinski, New York
Review of Books, October 27, 1988. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/10/27/a-star-is-born. 773 Glissant, “For Opacity,” 190. 774 “Le mouvement des mains qui prennent l’entour et le ramènent à soi. Geste d’enfermement sinon
d’appropriation.” Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990), 206.
775 Ibid 2, 4.

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Africa, Haiti, and China practice what he calls “surfacism.” These photographers, in his reading,
use studio backdrops and outfits with heavy patterning to clot up the surface of the image,
thereby resisting Cartesian perspectivalism and the intrusive colonial gaze it represents, resulting
in a “deperspectivalized surface.”776 (Figure 4.64) Unfortunately, Pinney does not prove that
such fabrics were only used in the studio, and not widespread in the daily life of society. He also
fails to show why artists with this political goal would resort to photography of all things -- a
medium inextricably bound to the Cartesian perspectivalist “enemy,” as both Erwin Panofsky
and common sense had long ago established.777
Sascha Scott’s article “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance” presents a much
more convincing argument about post-colonial veiling. In Scott’s reading, the Pueblo artist Awa
Tsireh successfully straddled the line between commodifying his culture’s renowned painting for
white consumption, and withholding the sacred and highly private knowledge present in
traditional imagery. By focusing on mainly benign imagery of daily life, dances, and animals, by
depicting certain figures in incorrect costume, by coding pieces of information through color,
shape, and animal designs, and by depicting certain figures wearing expressionless masks, Tsireh
made highly salable paintings which read as “authentic” to outsiders but which refused to
divulge all the Pueblo knew and believed.778 (Figures 4.65-4.66)
These are examples of veiling one’s own environment and cultural production. There are
other forms of affective inscrutability, many of which have been written about by scholars in
Asian, Asian American, and African American studies. While these are distinct from what I
776 Christopher Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Post- Colonialism, and Vernacular
Modernism,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham: Duke, 2014), 455. 777 See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books, 1991. 778 See Sascha Scott, “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance.” Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (December 2013): 597–
622.

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describe as Baltrop’s formal methods of masking, they form an important neighboring area of
study. Sunny Xiang writes about how Western perceptions of Asian inscrutability induced
anxiety during the Cold War, as America and its allies struggled to tell friend from foe.779
Christine Mok interprets Korean-born, New York City-based artist Nikki S. Lee’s work as a
demonstration of how the Asian face frustrates other people’s attempts at racial surveillance. 780
Eric Hayot examines the expression of physical discomfort as a cultural construct by exploring
Westerners’ inability to recognize Chinese pain.781 Tina Post considers black inscrutability as an
antidote to the frequent assumption of black affective excess by examining case studies from
comedy, boxing, dancing, and fine art. She endorses entanglement between different groups
within society, but reserves the right to withhold coherence or completion from the eyes of the
other.782
If Baltrop’s goal was to protect this waterfront community from scrutiny, why shoot it at
all? Or why not shoot the piers empty, as they sometimes were? Why the mix of explicit and
ambiguous sex -- and then sometimes no sex at all? It is because complete transparency and
complete opacity are two forms of invisibility.
783 Darlene Clark Hine warns us about the dangers
of invisibility in her essay about black female “dissemblance” in the Antebellum south, a
strategy of pretending to reveal one’s inner world to prying outsiders, all the while reserving
psychic space for one’s true self.784 Even if the strategy allowed women to “hold their own” in a
779 Sunny Xiang, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2020), 36.
780 Christine Mok, “On The Face of It: Nikki S Lee’s Layers” (lecture at the Performance Studies Working Group,
Yale University, New Haven, November 3, 2015). https://campuspress.yale.edu/ipsy/2015/10.
781 See Eric Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain: Sympathy, Modernity, and
Chinese Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 782 See Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. New York: New York University, 2023. 783 Nicholas de Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 22.
784 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on
the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1989): 915.

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hostile world, “their secrecy or ‘invisibility,’” may have inadvertently left a void which would be
filled with yet more negative stereotypes.785 In his preface to Renaud Camus’ Tricks: Twenty-five
Encounters (1981), Roland Barthes defends a kind of invisibility of sexuality. He argues that to
submit to another’s demand for transparency is “to proclaim yourself something is always to
speak at the behest of a vengeful Other, to enter into his discourse, to argue with him,” and --
most devastatingly -- “to seek from him a scrap of identity.”786 Eleven years later, the gay critic
and scholar D.A. Miller published a blistering criticism of Barthes, arguing that his silence never
actually masked his own sexuality, and in fact only helped his homophobic detractors, “who are
spared having to show how deeply their attacks are motivated by a name he never claims.”787
Neither Baltrop nor Glissant desired invisibility for their respective groups but rather
irreducibility -- a degree of complexity which could not be broken down and filed under
another’s reductive system.788
Conclusion
It was not opacity but something closer to invisibility which marked Baltrop’s career
during his lifetime. He would have no success exhibiting the work in galleries, even in the
handful of spaces that showed photography. According to Baltrop’s friend Randal Wilcox, some
gallerists expressed doubt to Baltrop that he had shot his own photographs, accusing him of
stealing the work of a white photographer, while others accepted his photos but treated him “as
though he was an idiot savant.” Others allegedly stole photographs from him.789 According to
785 Ibid. 786 Roland Barthes, “Preface,” in Tricks: Twenty-five Encounters, by Renaud Camus (New York: Serpent’s Tails,
1996) [1981], vii.
787 D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 25. 788 Glissant, “For Opacity,” 191. 789 Atoe, “Alvin Baltrop.”

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Baltrop, one gallerist allegedly told him, “as I turn the pages of your portfolio, I can honestly say
I’m afraid of your portfolio.” When he asked her why, she replied, “Because I am afraid to see
my husband or my son pop up in one of your photographs.” She then called him a “sewer rat,”
and he left.790 Baltrop did have a small solo show at The Glines, a non-profit gay organization in
1977, (Figure 4.67) and another one at an East Village gay bar in 1992.791 In 2008, four years
after Baltrop’s death, Douglas Crimp wrote a short essay about his work, helping to create his
reputation.792 Since then, his work has been shown in at least twelve solo exhibitions in four
countries.793
Baltrop was not a mere documenter of more famous artists’ work; he was not even a real
documentary photographer at all. At a moment when high powered artists became wealthy by
scrutinizing and objectifying gay black men, the law was engaged in a high-stakes struggle over
American citizens’ privacy, and elements of the African American community condemned
homosexuality, Baltrop made records of the New York City piers and the men who visited them
that were veiled and seemingly incomplete. The formal and technical means were distance,
obstruction, abstraction, under- and overexposure, and cutting of the print. By interrupting the
photographic circuit of information in these ways, Baltrop made his photographs more intriguing
and more visible. Indeed, the goal was not invisibility, the condition under which many
homosexual minorities already lived and died, but rather opacity.
790 Wilcox, “Alvin Baltrop: 1948-2004.” 791 Crimp, “On Alvin Baltrop,” 9. 792 Douglas Crimp, “Douglas Crimp On Alvin Baltrop.” Artforum International 46, no. 6. (February 2008): 269. 793 “Alvin Baltrop Curriculum Vitae,” Third Streaming, accessed November 16, 2023,
https://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-trust.

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CHAPTER 4
Tod Papageorge’s Woven Creations
Tod Papageorge (1940 - ) professor emeritus of photography at Yale, photographed in
New York City’s famous disco Studio 54 from 1978 to 1980. A common subject for
photojournalists and paparazzi due to the lavish parties held there for its famed guests,
photographs of the club were published widely in the newspapers, tabloids, and magazines of its
time. The previous three photographers discussed in this dissertation made their medium visible
by pressuring the epistemological circuit underwritten by their cameras’ indexicality. Burri was
stymied by external circumstances, Davidson was thrown off course by a confluence of mood
disorder and circumstance, and Baltrop deliberately obscured. Tod Papageorge is different in that
he believes the circuit never existed in the first place. Not only does he reject the photograph’s
ability to convey narrative, but he also came to, as Leo Rubinfien put it, “release it even from the
actuality it described.”794 A close associate of Garry Winogrand’s and John Szarkowski’s, he
carried the torch for a small community of non-believers, people who argued for an
extraordinarily narrow definition of photography’s powers of truth-telling.
This fine artist appears in a dissertation about documentary photography in part because
his subjects -- such as sports stadiums, a city park, and a famous nightclub -- have historically
been the purview of documentary photographers. He also appears here because his photographs
look like documents. In fact, he has complained about viewers mistaking his art as such, as when
he told an interviewer, “unfortunately…it turned out that most people needed to see the literal
794 Leo Rubinfien, “Garry Winogrand’s Republic,” in Garry Winogrand (San Francisco: SFMOMA and New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 36.

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lineaments of fabrication -- the studio effect -- to recognize that art-making had occurred.”795
Finally, he is relevant because so much of his writing takes the form of a diatribe against
photography’s documentary potential that his fine art photographs wind up being, in part, about
documentary photography.
Papageorge’s Biography
Papageorge took up photography in 1962, while studying English literature at the
University of New Hampshire. One of his professors there was Tom Williams, who would later
win a National Book award for the novel The Hair of Harold Roux. The book opens with a scene
of a depressive literature professor named Aaron Benham sitting in his office: “on the shelf just
above his desk are his five books in their various editions and translations, each full of words he
has painfully arranged in order.”796 The feeling of the products of one’s hard labor looming
overhead is -- by sheer coincidence -- the exact reason Papageorge got fed up trying to write
poetry in school, and in his last semester, decided to take a photography class. Doing research in
the library one day, he came across an image by the photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson taken
in Madrid in 1933. (Figure 5.1) It is a masterful, complex composition of children playing in
front of a large, white building irregularly pierced with tiny square windows. Despite the
children’s rapid movements, and the multiple layers of figures and building details in space, each
person is rendered as separately and legibly as the windows are in the wall above. The photo, in
other words, captures chaos without ever taming it. Papageorge later recalls thinking that CartierBresson’s photography was “poetry, and nothing else; fiction, and nothing else; inventions, and
795 Tod Papageorge and John Pilson, “Talking Pictures: Tod Papageorge In Conversation With John Pilson,”
Aperture 204 (Fall 2011): 79. 796 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Fictions Within Fictions,” New York Times, June 3, 1974,
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/06/03/79328383.html?pageNumber=29.

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nothing else.”797 (For what it is worth, such a reading would have surprised Cartier-Bresson, who
once wrote that “our task is to perceive reality, almost simultaneously recording it in the
sketchbook which is our camera.”)798 Papageorge sought out a few more photographs by the
master, and later the very same day, “I said to myself, I’m going to be a photographer. That was
it. Having no idea what that meant, having no idea about process, none at all.”799
The leap from poetry to photography was, for Papageorge, not as far as one might expect.
He believes they are linked because they both join the “denotative specificity of facts -- whether
the ‘mirrored’ facts of a photograph or those invoked by a poem’s common nouns” with
connotative meaning.800 Both forms, for Papageorge, are thus “abstraction-loathing.”801 (It is not
clear from Papageorge’s reasoning why the common nouns in a short story, for instance, do not
similarly link that form to the medium of photography. It is also not clear that all poetry requires
common nouns.) In any case, Papageorge loves poetry but cannot write it and in photography he
found something he believes is related that he could do. In comparison to writing poetry, with its
“anguish of sitting in place and ceaselessly sifting words together,” photographing in New York
City, where he moved a few weeks before the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, felt like
entering “a sprawling open-air theater where I had immediate and full rights to the stage, and
where stepping out of my front door was enough to set an exhilarating new show into motion.”802
797 Papageorge and Pilson: 24. 798 Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers (New York: Aperture,
1999), 27.
799 Richard B. Woodward, “Tod Papageorge,” BOMB 97 (Fall 2006): 24. 800 Tod Papageorge, “Curriculum: A List of Favorite Anythings,” Aperture 214 (Spring 2014): 14. 801 Ibid. 802 Papageorge recalls “climbing 99 steps to my apartment in Alphabet City in pitch blackness.” Tod Papageorge,
email to author, October 22, 2023. Tod Papageorge, “In the City,” in Garry Winogrand (San Francisco: SFMOMA
and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 401. Tod Papageorge, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of
Central Park (Göttingen: Steidl, 2007), ii. Tod Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography (New
York: Aperture, 2014), introduction, e-book.

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His photographic skills developed quickly, and during the 1970s, Papageorge received
two Guggenheim fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants. His
work was included in important surveys of the 1970s, including MoMA’s “Mirrors and
Windows,” the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “14 American Photographers,” and the Seagram’s
county courthouse documentation project.803 (Figure 5.2) But the market for fine art photography
was miniscule, and even the best artists of the day needed multiple sources of income to survive.
Marvin Israel (Diane Arbus’ partner and the art director of Harper’s Bazaar) taught a
photography course at Parsons School of Design, and when he left, he asked Papageorge to step
in.804 After brief stints there, at MIT, and at Harvard, Papageorge became the Walker Evans
Professor of Photography at Yale in 1979.805 Papageorge says that his goal was to teach “a
history of its strongest practitioners, and how the physical nature of their individual practices
affected the look and meaning of their work.”806 Indeed, he describes the embodied experience of
making photographs better than most anyone, as when he wrote, regarding Winogrand, that a
given theme “leaps up in these frames with breathless intensity, as if an alerted animal eye had
blinked and recorded exactly and without preference the play of the action scattered momentarily
in front of it.”807 For all of his griping about the agony of writing poetry, Papageorge writes
prose beautifully; he once described snapshots as similar to “lightning or wild strawberries, sense
803 Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Inc. commissioned 24 photographers, including Papageorge, to document over
1,100 county courthouses in both color and black and white, in order to mark the Bicentennial of the US.
“Photographs in the Seagram County Court House Archives,” Library of Congress, accessed March 18, 2024,
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/220_seagram.html. Andy Grundberg, “Arbitrariness Is The Enemy,” New York
Times, May 10, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/10/arts/photography-view-arbitrariness-is-the-enemy.html. 804 Aaron Schuman, “Park Life: An Interview with Tod Papageorge,” British Journal of Photography, April 2, 2008,
34.
805 He believes the success of his 1977 Museum of Modern Art exhibition and essay for Garry Winogrand’s “Public
Relations” project played a large part in getting the job. “Tod Papageorge,” Yale School of Art, accessed February
4, 2021, https://www.art.yale.edu/tod-papageorge. Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap.
16.
806 Ibid, introduction. 807 Ibid, chap. 10.

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affairs that strike but do not hold,” and the appeal of Walker Evans’ work being based on “that
sense that the lens has cut like an especially sharp knife into the light and drawn out a radiant
fact.”808 Papageorge published a collection of his writings entitled Core Curriculum in 2011. In
his time at Yale, he mentored many notable photographers, including Gregory Crewdson, PhilipLorca diCorcia, Katy Grannan, and An-My Lê, among others.809
Papageorge’s many talents accompany a few personal quirks. “My reputation was always
that of an arrogant-son-of-a-bitch,” Papageorge recalls.810 According to a profile in New York
magazine, he once told a student, “your work looks like it was made by someone who has never
read a book,” and there is a rumor he threw a chair at another student -- although he says he does
not remember that.811 “He was a bastard,” recalled Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (class of 1979) “and he
did not like my work in any way.”812 In the introduction to Core Curriculum, Papageorge writes
that he hopes the book will elicit in the reader the same feeling Tolstoy’s War and Peace elicited
in him.813 He believes the flash he used for his Central Park photographs makes his work look
like Manet’s paintings.814 Some of his photos of Studio 54 “have become iconic,” he told one
interviewer.815 “It’s embarrassing to say,” he once told the British Journal of Photography, “but I
was just very gifted as a photographer.”816 It does not end there. “I know that no other person in
the world could give a lecture remotely like I can,” he informed the same interviewer.817 For all
his bravado, Papageorge’s photographic career has lagged significantly behind his academic one.
808 Ibid, chap. 6. 809 Papageorge and Pilson, 18. 810 Papageorge, “Tod Papageorge,” 23. 811 Kolby Yarnell, “Senior Moment,” New York, March 29, 2007, https://nymag.com/arts/arts/all/features/29995. 812 Ibid. 813 Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, introduction. 814 Papageorge, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, iii. 815 Diane Smyth, “Tod Papageorge Pulls Studio 54 from the Archive,” British Journal of Photography (December
2014/January 2015): 59.
816 Schuman, 32. 817 Ibid 34.

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After pitching one photography project to various publishers and getting rejected by each one, he
realized that “persistence -- or the lack of it -- in the face of rejection becomes at some point a
question of psychology. And since it’s my psychology in question here, I reserve the right not to
study it too deeply.”818
Winogrand & Szarkowski
While attending a 1966 exhibition of Joel Meyerowitz’s photography at the Underground
Gallery in Manhattan, Papageorge was introduced to photographer Garry Winogrand.819
Papageorge, Winogrand, and Winogrand’s future patron John Szarkowski form a crucial group
in this chapter, whose cross-pollinating ideas about the unique strengths and deficits of
photography would influence generations of students. To understand any one of these
individuals, one must understand the others.820
Winogrand began his career taking photojournalistic commissions from magazines such
as Collier’s, Sports Illustrated, Pageant, and Infinity, but over time, he would have a profound
crisis of faith in the profession which will prove important to this chapter.821 (Figures 5.5-5.6) He
818 Papageorge, “Tod Papageorge,” 23. 819 Ibid 27. 820 In their yearslong friendship, Papageorge and Winogrand photographed on the street together and Papageorge
came to do a fair amount of Winogrand’s printing for him. After Meyerowitz split off from the group, a marvelous
and underrecognized street photographer named Paul McDonough joined. The shooting expeditions lasted a few
years until Winogrand moved to Chicago, and Papageorge took up the 6x9 format camera. See Papageorge, Core
Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 6. Szarkowski championed Winogrand endlessly, once calling him
“the central photographer of his generation.” Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since
1960, 23. To Papageorge, the curator had “hammered together a vision of photography that, for those of us lucky
enough to be in New York, amounted to a revelation.” Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography,
chap. 18. Szarkowski read and admired a 1974 essay in Aperture by Papageorge on the snapshot, and in 1977, asked
him to curate an exhibition of Winogrand’s “Public Relations” work, sequence the images in the catalog, and write
the accompanying essay. Ibid, introduction. (Figure 5.3) Papageorge later sequenced the photographs in
Winogrand’s 1980 book Stock Photographs, (Figure 5.4) and upon the master’s death in 1984, gave a moving
eulogy at his memorial. Rubinfien, 47. Tod Papageorge, “Garry Winogrand,” Aperture 95 (1984): 5, 76. Papageorge
contributed to his 1988 MoMA retrospective, and he would often write and speak eloquently about Winogrand,
describing him as “the center of the miracle” that was their historical moment. Rubinfien, 36. Papageorge and
Pilson, 20. 821 Rubinfien, 15

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did good work for his clients, and in return they helped him pay the bills -- important for a
middle-class family man like Winogrand -- and opened doors he would not have entered
otherwise, such as those to Minsky’s Burlesque in New Jersey.822 (Figure 5.7) But Collier’s
stopped publishing in 1957, and by the early 1960s, many photographers had come to realize that
magazines would, on their own, neither pay the bills nor fulfill them creatively.823 Winogrand
began taking commercial assignments to fill the gap in income. (Figure 5.8) Ad work turned out
to be, for him, little different from magazine work: in both cases, he felt his job was to illustrate
someone else’s idea in order to manipulate an audience.824
American magazine photojournalism relied on a series of visual tropes, such as a
predictable mix of photos made by wide angle and telephoto lenses. Winogrand once joked that
the gig boiled down to being able to make “a big head shot,” i.e. a tightly cropped image of a
face made with a telephoto lens, and a wide angle image of a man walking on a beach with a
thoughtful expression.825 In his essay on Winogrand’s work, Leo Rubinfien describes the
telephoto lens as a tool for signifying importance and certainty on the part of the photographer
and magazine. Amidst the chaos and complexity of life, in other words, the reader ought to rest
assured that subject X, when rendered with a telephoto lens, is a reliable key to unlocking the
meaning of the story. As Winogrand came to forego the telephoto lens in favor of the wide angle,
his photographs became more and more overloaded with information, visual facts which
threatened to both tear apart the photographic composition and prevent the kind of fast
readability common to magazine photography.826 But instead of simply making a mess,
822 Ibid 20. 823 John Szarkowski, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 30. 824 Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 9. 825 Ibid. 826 Rubinfien, 24.

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Winogrand made photographs charged with a kind of wild energy, as if the viewer were seeing
the world for the first time, untamed by the consolations of narrative. A photograph from 1960
can stand as an early representative of this “new” Winogrand.827 (Figure 5.9) On a crowded
Manhattan street, we catch a glimpse of the feet of a man who seems to be laying on the ground.
Nearby, a puddle of what appears to be blood glistens in the light. A boy stands watch over the
scene. The title, “New York, ca. 1960” offers next to no clue as to what has happened. Did the
man fall? Was he shot, or hit by a car? The boy’s neutral expression does not match the familiar
“horrified reaction shot” common to tabloid stories of the time -- so perhaps he was the
perpetrator? That would explain why the policeman in the center of the frame seems to be
moving in the boy’s direction (assuming he actually is a policeman.) While the broad outlines of
the photo are reminiscent of the “urban disaster” newspaper story, Winogrand offers more
mystery and alarm than fact or closure.
When Szarkowski took over the photography department at MoMA in 1962, he inherited
a program invested in using documentary photography to illustrate grand claims about the human
condition (what Winogrand derisively, humorously called the “Herman Condition.)
828 Not only
did Szarkowski immediately cancel a planned exhibition by the humanist W. Eugene Smith, but
he also replaced it with an exhibition entitled “Five Unrelated Photographers” (taking a swipe at
his predecessor Steichen’s universalist “Family of Man” exhibition.)829 (Figure 5.10)
However, it is with three later exhibitions, 1964’s The Photographer’s Eye, 1973’s From
the Picture Press, and 1977’s Public Relations that Szarkowski worked hardest to undermine --
827 I credit Rubinfien’s essay for this example. 828 Sarah Greenough, “The Mystery of the Visible: Garry Winogrand and Postwar American Photography,” in Garry
Winogrand (San Francisco: SFMOMA and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 26. 829 Ironically, two photographs of Winogrand’s appeared in Steichen’s 1955 exhibition. After the “Five Unrelated
Photographers” exhibition, Szarkowski’s turn away from magazine humanism was complete; it was, in
Papageorge’s words, when “Szarkowski became Szarkowski.” Tod Papageorge, “Introduction,” in Public Relations
by Garry Winogrand (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 10. Greenough, 33. Rubinfien, 57.

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bit by bit, in small ways and large -- documentary photography’s purchase on the world. I will
put pressure on Szarkowski’s ideas by placing these exhibitions in historical context by
examining events from the Vietnam War and the 1977 New York City blackout. With the first
exhibition, Szarkowski started laying down what he saw as a set of unchanging, Greenbergian --
and very modest -- claims for the medium. He argued that, no matter how “convincing and
unarguable” a photograph might appear, it is always a distorted, filtered version of the world --
“a different thing than the reality itself.”830 (Figure 5.11) Unable to create anything except a
series of details of the present moment, photography fails at time-based narrative.831 Within a
single detail, or frame, the photographer is able to “create a relationship” (emphasis added) --
note that Szarkowski avoids the words “uncover” or “reveal” -- between disparate elements.832
(The curator’s position seemed to have hardened by 1976, when he wrote that a photograph's
only real “content” was its own form. To attempt to photograph the same subject in another way,
in other words, was to create a new subject.
833)
For the exhibition “From the Picture Press,” Szarkowski and assistants Diane Arbus and
Carole Kismaric trawled newspapers published across the country over several decades for
photographs. They then presented these without captions in groups based on subject matter,
under headings such as “Winners,” “Losers,” and “Disasters,” in order to underscore the genrebased nature of news stories in the American media. (Figure 5.12) In his accompanying essay,
Szarkowski sarcastically claims to be “impressed with the skill and inventiveness with which the
journalist fills the one- or two-pound newspaper that arrives even on days when nothing
830 John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 8. 831 Ibid 8, 10. 832 Ibid 68. 833 John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 12.

195
whatsoever has happened that the historian will call important.”834 The photographic banalities
which make up the bulk of news photography, Szarkowski argues, could be recycled throughout
the year with few readers the wiser. The news is not “new,” he argues in a defeatist tone, as
“catastrophe and progress, pleasure and pain, victory and defeat” are “not ephemeral but
permanent.”835 Without crediting Daniel Boorstin for the idea, Szarkowski then argues that most
news photographs show pre-scripted events (“pseudo-events” in Boorstin’s words) rather than
moments stolen from the flow of life -- although photography’s indexicality can trick the viewer
into thinking otherwise.836 Coming uncomfortably close to claiming that no objective reality
exists, Szarkowski then argues that since pre-scripted news events can be altered to
accommodate the particular medium which will cover it, the writer makes a different news event
than the photographer. True “spot news” photographs are rare, and often illegible. Not much in
the essay is new, as media criticism had been a function of the US press since at least the World
War II-era New York City tabloid PM. Yet unlike that tabloid’s critiques, Szarkowski’s attack
does not seem to be made in the service of strengthening the public’s news judgment.837 News
photographs seem to hold value for Szarkowski only when stripped of their captions, revealing
their “mysterious, elliptical, and fragmentary” side.838 In this denuded state, such photographs
can pass muster with those Szarkowski deems to be the ultimate arbiters: “modern painters” such
834 Szarkowski failed to see that this spoke more to the commercial imperative of the US media at that moment
rather than to any kind of journalistic ontology. See John Szarkowski, From the Picture Press. New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1973.
835 Ibid 4. 836 See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 837 See Hill, The Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture. 838 To use another person’s lived experience, even a photographic trace of it, as “mysterious” fodder for one’s own
private imaginarium seems to be a form of bourgeois exoticism. Szarkowski, From the Picture Press, 6.

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as “Picasso, Magritte, and Bacon” who incorporated elements of news photography into their
own artwork.839
The Vietnam War era was an unfortunate time for an influential institution such as
MoMA to undermine public confidence in documentary photography, as Martha Rosler has
noted.840 Seven months before “From the Picture Press” opened, nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim
Phuc, also in a denuded state, was photographed by AP photojournalist Nick Ut running down a
road in South Vietnam and screaming “Nóng quá, nóng quá!” (Too hot! Too hot!) (Figure 5.13)
A U.S. commander had mistakenly ordered South Vietnamese jets to drop napalm on her village
in the Central Highlands, and the burning jelly, designed to cling to bodies, had incinerated her
clothes and was causing her skin to peel off in large sheets.841 (Looking at the photograph four
days later, President Nixon mused privately to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, “I’m wondering
if that was fixed,” i.e. posed.)842 In the years since, Phuc, although made famous by the
photograph, has not been baited by political or academic debates over photographic indexicality,
perhaps because her own body contains a permanent and still painful index of the event.843
(Figure 5.14)
839 Szarkowski did curate an exhibition called “Protest Photographs” in 1970, which would seem at first glance to be
socially minded, but he stripped the photographs of any information besides location and photographer name, and
then had them all printed at 16x20 inches with a 1-inch border -- much like a fine art photograph. Szarkowski, From
the Picture Press, 6. Simon Constantine, “From the Museum to the Street: Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations and
the Actuality of Protest,” Arts 8, no. 2 (2019): 7-8. 840 Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts on Documentary Photography,” in Decoys and Disruptions:
Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 189. 841 Napalm, named for the combination of thickening agents naphthenic and palmitic acids, can also cause blast
injuries, asphyxiation, carbon monoxide poisoning, neurotoxicosis, and cancer. Tom Buerkle, “Vietnam's Napalm
Photo Girl Forgives,” International Herald Tribune, June 29, 2000,
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/29/news/vietnams-napalm-photo-girl-forgives.html. Richard J. Chen, Gregory T.
Guldner and Curtis Knight, “Napalm Toxicity,” National Library of Medicine, accessed January 30, 2023,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537127/#:~:text=Napalm%20burns%20result%20in%20severe,to%20nap
alm%20may%20be%20severe.
842 Dan Collins, “Nixon, The A-Bomb, And Napalm,” CBS News, February 28, 2002,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nixon-the-a-bomb-and-napalm-28-02-2002. 843 Such debates show themselves to be, in Ariella Azoulay’s words, “anecdotal and marginal” whenever injured
parties such as Phuc demand that photographs of their wounds be made public to, as Phuc says, “let the world see

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The exhibition “Public Relations” consisted of work Winogrand shot between 1969 and
1973, using funding from a second Guggenheim Fellowship with the stated aim of
photographing “the effect of the media on events.”844 Winogrand’s decades of work as a
photojournalist had convinced him that many so-called news events did not happen
spontaneously but were created in order to be recorded and transmitted. Like Szarkowski’s From
the Picture Press exhibition, and Boorstin before him, Winogrand wanted to foreground the
artifice of the media circus.845 Three months before “Public Relations” opened at MoMA, as
Papageorge was in the final stages of curating it, an unscripted news event occurred in New York
the likes of which New Yorkers had never seen before. The July 1977 electrical blackout and its
attendant looting and arson, occurring during a historic heat wave and sky-rocketing
unemployment, left devastating scars across the city, which, like the scars on Phan Thi Kim
Phuc’s body, remain visible to this day.
The electric company Consolidated Edison, or ConEd, served all five boroughs of New
York City as well as most of Westchester County to the north, an area of about 600 square miles
with a population of 8.3 million people.846 New York City’s stringent air quality regulations held
that any electrical generation within city limits had to burn costly but cleaner low-sulfur oil
rather than cheaper but dirtier fuels such as coal.847 As Jonathan Mahler’s The Bronx is Burning:
1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City shows, ConEd had solved this
how horrible wars can be.” Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008),
118. Buerkle, “Vietnam's Napalm Photo Girl Forgives.”
844 In her letter of recommendation for Winogrand, Diane Arbus wrote that funding Winogrand to start the project
“will be nearly tantamount to giving the publicity agents enough media to hang themselves.” Rubinfien, 58.
845 Szarkowski, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World, 32. 846 “The Con Edison Power Failure of July 13 and 14, 1977,” U.S. Department of Energy Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission, June 1978, 7.
847 Mahler, 176.

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challenge neatly by simply importing (oftentimes dirty) electricity made elsewhere.848 One
source was the massive nuclear power plant called Indian Point 3, located thirty-five miles north
of Manhattan.849 (Figure 5.15) Before the electricity generated there entered New Yorkers’
apartments, it had to be “stepped down” in voltage at a substation located near the plant.850 But
just after sunset on July 13, 1977, lightning struck that substation. As intended in such events,
circuit breakers automatically cut off the electrical supply on the two impacted lines (out of four
total) going south to the city, in order to isolate the problem. The lightning was gone in a flash,
but the circuits did not reopen as they were meant to. (It was later determined that this was due in
part to a loose locking nut.)851 Power plants cannot store energy once it is created; once
unleashed, it has to go somewhere. With its path blocked at this substation, the entire Indian
Point facility automatically shut down, as programmed, so as not to, in a manner of speaking,
pour water down a clogged drain.852 With that generator down, generators in New England
picked up the slack, and sent a torrent of energy south.853 These electrical lines had not been
designed to handle such an enormous additional surge (equivalent to Indian Point’s entire output)
and they would surely burn out if nothing changed, and quickly.854 Monitoring this unfolding
crisis from afar, a state energy supervisor began making urgent calls around the region, trying to
ease the burden on those crucial electrical lines by increasing production by generators in New
York City and Long Island, and decreasing production by generators in New England.855 And
then, nineteen minutes after the first lightning strike, it happened again.856 Like last time, the
848 Ibid. 849 Ibid 179. 850 Ibid. 851 Ibid. 852 Ibid 178. 853 Ibid 180. 854 Ibid. 855 New York did have backup generators within city limits for special circumstances. Ibid 181. 856 United States Department of Energy Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, June 1978, 1.

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circuits opened, stopping the flow of electricity on the other two of the four lines until the
problem abated, but then, like last time, one circuit failed to reclose.857 Now only one of the four
lines was working. The electricity on the broken lines traveled back “upstream” and onto the one
remaining open line going into New York and Westchester.858 Now carrying a load of energy
previously found only in Greek mythology, this electrical line superheated, physically expanded,
and sagged down towards the ground.859
Colleagues frantically called William Jurith, the system operator at ConEd, begging him
to do the one thing that could save the line: cut the power to some of ConEd’s customers.
Instead, he froze.860 “We got the impression that he was disintegrating,” recalls the person who
later directed the city’s investigation. “He was in breakdown mode.”861 Soon, the last remaining
line sagged far enough that it touched a tree. Its circuit opened and Westchester County instantly
went dark.862 Smaller lines coming into New York from New Jersey and Long Island soon
overloaded and failed, as did the city’s reserve generators.863 Except for some small flashing red
lights atop the Citibank building and the World Trade Center, and the flame in the torch of the
Statue of Liberty, New York went dark at 9:36pm.864 (Figures 5.16-5.17) Electricity was out for
as much as twenty-five hours in parts of the service area.865
Later, after there was nothing left to steal, looting subsided and the fires began. (Figure
5.18) The pillaging had begun almost immediately after the city went dark, often carried out by
young men with criminal records, although the crowds tended to grow and diversify, until little
857 Mahler, 182. 858 Ibid. 859 Ibid. 860 Ibid. 861 Ibid 183. 862 Ibid 195. 863 Ibid 196. 864 Ibid. 865 U.S. Department of Energy Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, June 1978, 1.

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children and church-going grandfathers were stepping over broken glass with armfuls of stolen
clothes, or alcohol, or electronics.866 This happened in every borough of the city, although it was
worst in Bushwick, Brooklyn. (Figure 5.19) Only about twenty minutes after the power went out,
someone drove a stolen car through the iron gate of a sporting goods store in the heart of
Bushwick’s commercial area at Broadway and Decatur. A crowd surged in, clambering over
twisted metal and shattered glass. They ransacked the place and assaulted the white business
owner.867 A reporter for Time recalled that “the evidence of looting was numbing.”868 One police
officer said of the looters, “It’s like a fever struck them.”869 Thirteen blocks west, at Broadway
and Gates, a fireball blew out a store window, injuring twenty-two firefighters.870 (This was one
of sixty-five serious blazes across the city out of a total of 1,037.)871 As firetrucks raced to the
site of fires, looters flung bottles and rocks down at them from the elevated track above
Broadway, and upon arriving, firefighters often needed police protection from the crowds.872
When one group of firefighters abandoned their truck to take cover, some police officers climbed
aboard and turned the hose on the looters, sending them skittering.873 At its worst, twenty fires
blazed in Bushwick at one time.874 City-wide, two thousand businesses had been looted, the cost
of which comprised the bulk of the estimated $1 billion in losses.875
866 Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter, “Blackout Looting!” Society 16, no. 4 (May 1979): 69. 867 Mario Hernandez, “‘We Are without God Now’: Benign Neglect and Planned Destruction of Brooklyn’s
Bushwick Neighborhood,” Journal of Urban History 49, no. 2 (2023): 421. 868 “The Blackout Night of Terror,” Time, July 25, 1977, 17. 869 Ibid 12. 870 Judith Cummings, “Store‐Pillaging Unchecked In Two Brooklyn Sections,” New York Times, July 15, 1977,
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/07/15/archives/storepillaging-unchecked-in-two-brooklyn-sections.html. 871 “The Blackout Night of Terror,” 12. 872 Mahler, 204. 873 Ibid. 874 Cummings, “Store‐Pillaging Unchecked In Two Brooklyn Sections.”. 875 “The Blackout Night of Terror,” 22.

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The Daily News declared it to be “the black night of our soul.”876 (Figure 5.20) These
were the “dark ages, when civilization went out like a light.”877 Both Newsweek and Time
published special color editions devoted to the story. (Figures 5.21-5.22) Newsweek’s article
“Heart of Darkness” is full of connotations of savagery, primitiveness, and violence, all
connected to racial minorities: a “throaty mass scream” is followed by “a blast of soul and salsa,
a torchlight parade” and then mass looting and “whooping sirens and shattering glass.”878 A
headline from Tokyo’s Mainichi Shimbun read “Panic Grips New York,” while West Germany’s
Bild Zeitung called it “New York’s Bloodiest Night,” and London’s Daily Express lamented the
state of “The Naked City.”879 (News coverage such as this both reflected and created the city’s
decline, by cementing in minds an image of the city as anathema to both family and business.880
Peter Lauer, president of Lauer and Holbrook, a Chicago-based executive recruiting and
placement firm, noted at the time that “we already were handling too many resumes from people
who said they’d go anyplace in the country except New York. This blackout and looting will
only strengthen that feeling.”)881
The blackout and its aftermath left a searing trace on Bushwick’s landscape and
community. A mile and a half of Broadway -- more than thirty blocks -- were completely
destroyed. Residents had looted 134 stores, and had burned 45 of them.882 Forty percent of
commercial and retail businesses would fail within the year.883 Many people simply got up and
876 “Black Night of Our Soul: Time to Light a Candle and Curse the Darkness,” New York Daily News, July 15,
1977, 2.
877 “City Must Get New Worms Out of the Apple,” New York Daily News, July 16, 1977, C3. 878 Peter Goldman, “Heart of Darkness,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977, 18. 879 “The Blackout Night of Terror,” 21. 880 Deputy Mayor Osborn Elliott, who was in charge of attracting business to the city, said, with grim
understatement, that the debacle “doesn’t help.” “The Blackout Night of Terror,” 22.
881 Tom Nicholson, “The Impact,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977, 17. 882 Mahler, 205. 883 It is not clear if this means 40% of pre-blackout businesses, or 40% of businesses left standing in its immediate
aftermath. John B. Manbeck, The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 47.

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left. In 1975, Bushwick’s population was 122,000, but by 1980, three years after the
conflagration, it had dropped to 93,000.884 A photograph made in 1992 for the New York Times
shows buildings in rubble, as if the blackout had happened the day before. (Figure 5.23) In 2007,
I lived half a block from Broadway in what was once the epicenter of the looting, and found the
area to be ragged and dangerous. A book published in 2008 noted that many stores and housing
units in the area remained abandoned.885
Papageorge’s Ideas
Turning away from the first two members of this tightly knit photography trio, we turn to
Papageorge’s own writings and images. It makes sense that Szarkowski asked fellow-skeptic
Papageorge in particular to curate an exhibition meant to cast doubt on news photography. The
most frequently and urgently stated argument in Papageorge’s Core Curriculum is about the
essentially fictional nature of all photography. From the 1977 essay accompanying Winogrand’s
“Public Relations” exhibition in which he described the photograph “as wanton a fiction as any
description” to a talk given at Yale in 2009 in which he described Atget’s photographs as “feats
of imaginative fabrication,” Papageorge has tenaciously held the line. He has expressed a deepseated frustration with the postmodernist criticism of photography. “We knew we were making
fictions,” he says. “We knew we were creating something, in many cases, out of nothing.”886 In
fact, he has gone farther than either Winogrand or Szarkowski. The year before his death,
Winogrand had let slip the dreaded phrase, when he referred to the “social meaning” of his
work.887 Four years after Winogrand’s death, Szarkowski seems to have had a change of heart.
884 As of 2015, Bushwick’s population of 114,134 is still below the peak of 138,000 in 1970. Hernandez, 421. 885 Greenberg, 186. 886 In a talk at Yale, Papageorge discussed Eugène Atget photographs as “feats of imaginative fabrication” which
were “literally put…together.” Papageorge and Pilson, 79. Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography,
chap. 2.
887 Greenough, “The Mystery of the Visible: Garry Winogrand and Postwar American Photography,” 396.

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He came to see past that photographer’s “clever evasions” and concluded that the photographer
“surely understood that…his pictures described his world.”888
Some of his frequently-espoused ideas resemble those of people he not only does not
credit, but actually disparages.889 He once claimed that “Garry Winogrand…found whatever he’d
seen of…Sontag’s original articles about photography in…the New York Review of Books grimly
laughable.”890 In truth, Winogrand had enthusiastically recommended her 1964 essay “Against
Interpretation” to any student in Rochester’s Visual Studies Workshop who wanted to better
understand his art.891 Furthermore, the published version of Winogrand’s talk begins with an
epigraph from Sontag’s related 1965 article “On Style.”892 In fact, Sarah Greenough believes
Sontag and especially “Against Interpretation,” (as well as Szarkowski and his book The
Photographer’s Eye) were the key intellectual influences on Winogrand’s career.893 Unlike
Winogrand, however, Papageorge disavowed Sontag, even though he would appear to owe her
an intellectual debt, in particular regarding the issue of aesthetic form. He repurposed these ideas
for his own project of deconstructing photography’s documentary claims.
Sontag wrote “Against Interpretation” as an alternative to a very long-standing method of
decoding cultural output now known as symptomatic reading. In her day, the two dominant
camps of symptomatic readers took their direction from either Freud or Marx, and searched for
clues which might either open a path to the unconscious or unveil a previously naturalized
888 Szarkowski, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World, 40-41. 889 Papageorge is usually quick to give credit and praise, even if, by coincidence, he often stands to gain something
from the association, as when he praised the “great-hearted / great-minded” Brassaï and then promptly mentioned
that Brassaï’s wife once called Papageorge his “fils spirituel,” or, “spiritual son” in French. Papageorge, Core
Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 15. 890 Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 18. 891 Raphael Rubinstein, “Snap Judgments: Exploring the Winogrand Archive,” Art in America (February 2002), 50–
51.
892 Sontag included both essays in her 1966 collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Garry Winogrand,
“Monkeys Make the Problem More Difficult -- A Collective Interview with Garry Winogrand (1970),” Image
Magazine 15, no. 2, (July 1972), 118. 893 Greenough, 394-395.

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capitalist ideology.894 Sontag rejected the notions of manifest and latent content, and the
interpretive leap needed to get from one to the other. The form of the thing itself is never
attended to, she lamented -- in fact, she argued, form is the real content.895 When one is able to
experience art unencumbered by interpretation, one has reached a state of what Sontag calls
“transparence.”896
Now consider this statement by Papageorge. In his 2007 book of Central Park
photographs, he recalls a
…period when photography became a fashionable object of attention for a stream
of writers and cultural critics that included Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Janet
Malcolm, Rosalind Krauss, and a number of others. To study the pictures in this
book, however, is to see none of that: to my eyes, at least, they seem undistracted,
if not unmoved, by the more than twenty-five years of increasing notice and
intellectual commotion that engulfed photography then.897 (Emphasis added)
Note how Papageorge contrasts his own “undistracted eyes” to the “intellectual commotion”
made by these interpreters of photography. On the one hand is a laser-like focus on the visible
world, on the other is a lather of words. This is clearly a statement made by a photographer who
is against interpretation. In interviews and writings, Papageorge returns repeatedly to his goal of
making a “perfect web” in each photograph -- a kind of impeccable surface-level resolution of
composition.898 Instead of revealing social truth, cameras being “fitful in their ability to render a
discursive description,” his ideal photograph displays instead a “weave and brilliance of
design.”899 When, or if, that weave and brilliance of design appears in his work, it is
894 See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108 (Fall 2009): 1-
21. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1966), 12.
895 Ibid 9, 11. 896 Ibid 13. 897 Papageorge, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, iv. 898 Woodward, “Tod Papageorge,” 28. 899 He has also described such an ideal photograph as having “the shape of being shaped.” Tod Papageorge, “Tod
Papageorge,” Aperture 19, no. 1 (1974): 26. Papageorge, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, v.

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accomplished through human gesture -- people, usually in public spaces, reaching out to, pushing
past, or embracing other people -- even if that “embrace” is only real in the flattened,
foreshortened space of a photographic print. (Figure 5.24) “These pictures aren’t about
implication,” Papageorge told one interviewer, “in the sense that if you look at it from the right
angle with the right sense of reverence, you’re going to figure out what it was supposed to mean.
It shows you what it means, right there, through the gesture.”900 The form, in other words, is the
content.901
As a self-styled fiction photographer, Papageorge eschewed any talk of morality in
connection with photography, and viciously criticized Susan Sontag in print when she did.
However, it is easy to find examples of his work in which he contradicts himself. In a November
15, 1973 essay, Susan Sontag chided Diane Arbus for painting her subjects with a broad
(tar)brush. In leveling down this diverse array of people, Sontag argues, Arbus ignored “the
determining weight of history” in order to fashion “a world in which everybody is an alien—
hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships.”902
Decades later, this essay still seems to rankle Papageorge. In a 2009 interview, he marveled at
the supposed inability of “capacious minds like Sontag’s, to say nothing of those of almost every
art historian” to distinguish between a photograph and its subject.903 To him, Sontag must be “no
more sophisticated than the proverbial tribesman who believes that a photograph made of him
900 Papageorge and Pilson, 79. 901 More similarities exist between Papageorge’s writing and Sontag’s 1966 essay “On Style.” On the topic of
meaning, Sontag writes, “A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer
to a question…Art is not about something; it is something.” On the same topic, Papageorge wrote in 1977, “Keats’s
Ode on a Grecian Urn is not, as one of my high school English teachers said, ‘about’ the idea that ‘anticipation is
greater than realization…’ Meaning is inseparable from the series of specific responses we make [to the artwork].”
Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 9. Susan Sontag, “On Style,” in Against
Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 21. 902 Susan Sontag, “Freak Show,” New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/11/15/freak-show. 903 Based on this statement, it is unclear which works, if any, by either Sontag or an art historian, Papageorge has
actually read. Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 12.

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steals a piece of his soul.”904 In Papageorge’s reading, Sontag’s faulty logic has it that “a picture,
because it resembles the world, is therefore somehow equivalent, and morally responsible, to
it.”905
Yet Papageorge’s thinking does not seem to bear out in one of his major projects. In
1970, Papageorge used a Guggenheim fellowship to photograph at sports events across the US,
from the Little League World Series to the Indianapolis 500 to Major League Baseball games.
(Figure 5.25) Although the title of the resulting book, American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent
the War in Vietnam, indicates that Papageorge sees the subject matter through a political lens, he
also claims to have an avowed distaste for “concerned photography” and photojournalists.906
(The word he uses -- “pamphleteer” -- evokes the erratic polemicist on a street corner, when in
reality the war received a level of scrutiny unprecedented in American history from a trained and
adversarial press corps, without which most Americans would have been left in the dark.)907 In
an email sent to Tim Davis, the author of the book’s introduction, Papageorge doth protest too
much by writing “I REALLY had no particular ‘feeling’ for what I was photographing.”908
Instead, Papageorge insists, formal concerns were top of mind. Impressed by how CartierBresson had made photographs of large crowds with a 50mm lens, Papageorge wanted to outdo
the master and use the wider angle 28mm lens to capture even larger crowds, while trying to
make clear and coherent photographs -- or in Papageorge’s grandiloquent words, to “suggest
art’s perennial solution, perfect form.”909 (“Few of the individual images are remarkable,” judged
904 Ibid. 905 Ibid chap. 9. 906 Tim Davis, “To Hell in a Hand Camera,” in American Sports, 1970: or, How We Spent the War in Vietnam, by
Tod Papageorge (New York: Aperture, 2007), 127.
907 Granted, it took the US press until 1968 to become truly adversarial, three years after US troops first arrived in
Vietnam. Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 12. Hendershot, 11. 908 Davis, 127. 909 Ibid. Papageorge and Pilson, 23.

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a New York Times critic.)910 It is surprising, then, to hear him describe in hindsight the sports
work as “protest” photographs which are “critical, even to the point of being…a kind of
indictment.”911 The US war in Vietnam was close to its nadir, and Papageorge hoped to capture
“the violently disturbed American spirit.”912 (In general, the photographs do not accomplish that.
They show no more malice or bloodlust, even in the faces of excited fans, than any other
photograph of a sporting event.) (Figure 5.26) The most charitable interpretation would be to
instead position the work as a critique of Americans’ blithe unawareness of their own
government’s foreign misadventures.913 If the “perfect form” Papageorge sought does ever
appear in the photographs, it is not the thing which carries the weight of the photographer’s halfsuppressed moral outrage, but rather language, starting with the accusatory title of the book. In
several photographs, text within the frame, whether in the form of a slogan on a t-shirt: “Fly the
friendly skies of Viet Nam” (Figure 5.27) newspaper headlines: “Baltimore Wins First One”
right next to “Secret attempt to buy city hall” (Figure 5.28) or a poster for a film called “White
Zombie” appearing next to a bas-relief of a football player (Figure 5.29) does this work, much
like a political cartoon. (Figure 5.30) Other photographs focus on foolish moments amidst the
spectacle of modern American sports, such as a male cheerleader appearing to spank a female
colleague on all fours before an audience of thousands, (Figure 5.31) two drunken fans kissing
languidly in a field of trash, (Figure 5.32) and women leading a cheer for an audience of port-apotties (a photograph which he would later explain using a reference to yet another text, a line by
910 Ken Johnson, “Art in Review,” New York Times, August 20, 2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/arts/design/21gall.html.
911 Bruno Bayley, “Studio 54 Still Looks Like the Best Club of All Time,” Vice, October 20, 2014,
https://www.vice.com/da/article/mv549v/studio-54-tod-papageorge-293. Tod Papageorge, Core Curriculum:
Writings on Photography (New York: Aperture, 2014), chap. 12, e-book. 912 Woodward, “Tod Papageorge,” 30. 913 Papageorge forgets, however, that some people in the audience, in particular relatives of service members
deployed in Vietnam, might have sought out momentary pleasure in games not despite the war, but because of it --
as well as the possibility that one might be simultaneously for the Yankees and against Yankee imperialism.

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Yeats: “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.”)914 (Figure 5.33) But these
photographs do not rise above the level of a very familiar form of satire -- specifically Satire X,
written by Juvenal two millennia ago, in which he lamented his fellow citizens’ forsaking of
Roman ideals in favor of “panem et circenses.”915 Papageorge’s contempt for his plebeian
subjects is clear, if not unique, as the New Left was at this very moment of post-Hard Hat Riot
dismay distancing itself from what Herbert Marcuse called the “counterrevolutionary” working
class, or as Ivan Karp called them simply, the “enemy.”916
Central Park
If in the sports project Papageorge had created meaning by including visible text within
his photographic frames, in the park project, his engagement with language becomes profound.
As he put it to one interviewer, the first half of the book “is quite literally based on the first six
chapters of Genesis.”917 He had gotten a new, bulkier medium-format camera and saw that it
would prohibit him from the kind of athletic dipping and lunging necessary to take pictures on
the hectic street, and so he moved to the calmer environment of the park.918 What began as a kind
of directionless flirtation in 1966 turned into a serious project in 1977, when he won a second
914 Christine Smallwood, “Back Talk: Tod Papageorge,” Nation, May 15, 2008,
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/back-talk-tod-papageorge. 915 Juvenal, The Satires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 89. 916 The Hard Hat Riot took place on May 8, 1970. In it, hundreds of pro-war construction workers beat up students
who were protesting the recent bombing of Cambodia. The event helped to define in the American imagination the
working class as essentially conservative and led to the New Left’s embrace of student over workers. As it happens,
Garry Winogrand made one of his iconic photographs at the riot, shown here: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artobject-page.164190.html. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), 121, 114.
917 This framing device was employed largely after shooting was complete; i.e. Papageorge did not go hunting for
scenes which might illustrate scenes from the book, but rather mapped the story back onto pre-existing photographs
as a way of giving this years-long project some form. Papageorge, “Tod Papageorge,” 23. 918 Ibid.

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Guggenheim and could devote himself full time to it, and ended in 1992, when he accepted the
position at Yale.919
Early frames in the book feel primordial, crisscrossed with tangled, fallen branches
suggesting the very earliest moments of Creation. (Figure 5.34) Then Adam appears, pale amidst
luminous grass, (Figure 5.35) and is joined by Eve. (Figure 5.36) The snake makes its entrance,
in the form of a squiggly, fallen branch. (Figure 5.37) Soon enough, an attractive blonde woman
on a bench is eating the apple. (Figure 5.38) Given the low opinion of journalism and
photojournalism shared by Papageorge and his colleagues, this photograph seems particularly
ironic. If the woman’s apple is the key to the tree of knowledge -- “your eyes shall be opened,
and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” promised the snake -- the publications scattered
through the frame, at left, center, and right, surely must be “the knowledge.”920
In the book’s text, Papageorge writes that he wanted to “demonstrate how a photograph,
torn from local circumstances, might have the resonance of a more general, or elemental, tale.”921
Yet the newspaper in the photograph of “Eve” eating the apple is, upon closer scrutiny, quite
clearly the May 6, 1980 issue of the New York Times, and the news it offers is very much “from
local circumstances.” (Figure 5.39) Visible at top right is a mugshot of Nathan Giles, Jr., a
career-criminal who had just been given a 62 ½ years-to-life sentence for the 1978 murder of a
25-year-old nurse named Bonnie Anne Bush in an abandoned building at 15 West 102nd Street -
- just half a block from Central Park -- as well as for the attempted murder of three policemen
who had given chase, and for the kidnapping of a young man during the ordeal.922
919 Ibid. 920 W. H. Stevenson, King James's Bible: A Selection (New York: Longman, 2010), 64. 921 Papageorge, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, vii. 922 Lee A. Daniels, “Slaying Suspect Testifies Victim Came for Drugs,” New York Times, March 18, 1980, B2. Lee
A. Daniels, “Slayer of Mount Sinai Nurse Gets 62 1/2 Year to Life Term,” New York Times, May 6, 1980, B1.

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Mug shots such as this one of Giles, Jr. owe their existence to the Parisian police officer
Alphonse Bertillon who invented the form in the late 19th century. In the years since, mug shots
have come to stand as a symbol of absolute optical empiricism, shorn of art and artifice -- at least
in the popular imagination. Yet, as Allan Sekula’s 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive”
demonstrates, doubts about photographic positivism had existed for a century by the time of his
writing.923 Although Bertillon’s police department had collected over 100,000 photographs of
criminals, they were marked by an endless variety of technical quality, pose, subject distance,
angle of view, etc.924 To bring some rigor to the process, he formalized the rules of criminal
portraiture (Figure 5.40) -- and, crucially, also supplemented photography with anthropometry,
or the measurements of the body, (Figure 5.41) as well as highly standardized written notes.925
The photograph is not “everything,” as the present-day myth of the mugshot has it -- but it is also
not “nothing,” as Papageorge has it. When supplemented with data of other sorts, the photograph
can point us to the Real. In the case of Nathan Giles, Jr., in addition to the hundreds of mug shots
distributed to police officers on the street and in cars, police had verbal descriptions taken from
911 calls, as well as his fingerprints from prior arrests.926 Even as Papageorge tries to push his
Central Park photographs into flights of fancy, oftentime painful details -- punctums, in Barthes’
wording -- drag them back down to Earth.
Papageorge often struggles to lift the scenes in his viewfinder out of the banal. One
photograph he took in Central Park while out shooting with Winogrand one day (not included in
his book) illustrates this well. “I noticed a handsome couple walking toward me,” Papageorge
923 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 17. 924 Ibid 26. 925 Bertillon did this without resorting to the essentializing pseudoscience still common in his day. Ibid 30, 32. 926 “Photos Help in Search For Suspect in Murder Of Mount Sinai Nurse,” New York Times, November 29, 1978,
B13. Leonard Buder, “Police Accuse 3 Of Poor Actions In Fatal Assault,” New York Times, December 1, 1978, B5.

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recalls “they looked like fashion models, in their 20s, both well-dressed -- improbably walking
with a pair of chimpanzees who were as immaculately attired as they were…”927 He snapped a
photograph. In it, the figure and ground collapse into each other; the woman’s upper body and
the chimp in her arms get lost in the mass of detail behind her. (Figure 5.42) Her self-conscious
grin, placed against a background of onlookers, marks the photograph as a snapshot of a
zoological stunt. “Then, bang!,” Papageorge recalls. “I felt myself being pushed in the back away
from this odd little group. A real shove, unfriendly, hard. And, of course, it was Garry, camera
already up, making pictures, who’d done it.”928 In Winogrand’s photograph, the figures dominate
the composition, the chimps are clearly visible (they appear placid and inward-looking), and the
humans’ expressions are curiously solemn. (Figure 5.43) There is no trace of the gag here; for
the human “parents,” the presence of the chimp “children” is a given. What matters for the
grownups seems to be quiet reflection and sober self-composure as they attend some kind of
absurd public vigil. (When a member of MoMA’s staff discovered that the man was in fact an
animal trainer named Lester Oaks, Szarkowski refused to listen and let the mystery be
spoiled.)929
Studio 54
Papageorge ended 1977 -- a terrific year for him professionally, in which he won a
Guggenheim, started shooting the Central Park work in earnest, and curated an exhibition at
MoMA -- with a bang. A celebrity photographer friend named Sonia Moskowitz invited him to
927 Tod Papageorge, “About a Photograph: New York, 1967, by Garry Winogrand,” Transatlantica 2 (2014): 1.
http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7084.
928 Ibid 2. 929 Rubinfien, 58.

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photograph in Studio 54, located on West 54th Street in midtown Manhattan.930 He first visited
the club on New Year’s Eve, shot the bulk of the photos in his book in 1978, and finished
shooting in 1980.931 All in all, he visited about five or six times, and shot about 1,500
photographs.932
Description of club
Studio 54 opened in the spring of 1977 in an old opera house originally built in 1927 and
later repurposed as a CBS broadcast studio.933 (Figure 5.44) If one were willing to venture into
desolate west Midtown, and able to beat a path through the crowd of hundreds begging to gain
entrance, (Figure 5.46) and catch the eye of the teenaged doorman Marc Benecke, (Figure 5.47)
and pay the entrance fee, one would enter a long mirrored hallway (visible in several of
Papageorge’s photographs) largely untouched since the theater days. (Figure 5.48) Already the
music would be audible, and one would be able to see a faint glow at the far end of the hallway.
Entering the main body of the venue, one would first see the main bar, square-shaped, rotated
forty-five degrees off the main axis, glowing gold and frosty blue. (Figure 5.49) Banquettes
made of shiny tubular pillows zigzag around the perimeter of the room. (Figure 5.50) Turning
left, the enormous space slowly reveals itself as one walks under the overhanging mezzanine
930 In her late twenties at the time, the daughter of a massively successful real estate tycoon, Moskowitz would cover
two to three events a night almost every night of the week during the high season and sell her photographs to
publications around the world. Like any photographer in her line of work, what counted in the images was proximity
to celebrity, graphic legibility (because publications often printed them small) and vividness of gesture and
expression in her subjects. (Figure 5.45) Moskowitz found herself drawn both to the “ornamentation” of her subjects
and “the sense of power” she got from being able to “pick and choose who you will favor.” (After all, in the 1970s,
photographers had more freedom in picturing celebrities, in part because the earthquake that was John Lennon’s
assassination had not yet happened.) Colleen Kelsey, “Tod Papageorge’s Studio,” Interview Magazine, November
14, 2014, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/tod-papageorge-studio-54. Marie Brenner, “Paparazzi Princess,”
New York, January 10, 1983, 14. Peter Howe, Paparazzi (New York: Artisan, 2005), 63. 931 Tod Papageorge, “Studio 54,” Lensculture, https://www.lensculture.com/articles/tod-papageorge-studio-54. 932 Smyth, 59. 933 Andrew Stooke, “Nights of Red and Gold,” Public 31, no. 61 (2020): 255.

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level and onto the former theater stage, now a roiling dancefloor. Because seeing and being seen
were such important factors in the club’s appeal, stage lighting designers Paul Marantz and Jules
Fisher had chosen a set of twelve tall tubes of red and yellow light that rose and fell in the vast
space overhead to make Studio 54 brighter than typical discos.934 (Figure 5.51) The elevated DJ
booth sits at stage right -- although the visual splendor of old New York theater architecture
mixed with cutting edge interior design, the mid-century sci-fi of the kinetic lighting, and the
vertiginous presence of celebrities and the photographers recording them, means the music is
often not the priority.935 A discreet door leads down to a VIP room in the basement, although
with its concrete floor and walls made of chain link fencing, it looks more like, as Bob Colacello
writes, “a detention camp where all the prisoners of war were rich and famous.”936 A large
staircase leads up to the darker mezzanine level, which is the site of rampant sex and drug use.937
The club’s design had been spearheaded by the Peruvian-born jet setter Carmen D’Alessio,
former PR chief for fashion designer Valentino, (Figure 5.52) even if her role is overshadowed in
the public’s mind by Steve Rubell, (Figure 5.53) the diminutive and slovenly co-owner, who
loved toadying to celebrities and making cutting remarks to the people in line outside, and his
detail-oriented co-owner Ian Schrager, both of whom would go to prison for tax evasion.938
934 Although Studio 54 perhaps represents its apotheosis, human vanity predates the opening of the disco; Wolfgang
Schivelbusch noted that 18th century French theaters bathed their audiences in a “dusky light” for this same
purpose. However, it remains true that Studio 54 was brighter than most other discos. Schivelbusch, 209. For
blueprints of the club and photographs of its construction, see Matthew Yokobosky, Studio 54: Night Magic (New
York: Rizzoli Electa and Brooklyn Museum, 2020), 26.
935 Richie Kaczor was a very talented DJ, but he stuck to conventional hits for his audience at Studio 54. Lawrence,
2, 281.
936 Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2014), chap. 35, e-book. 937 Haden-Guest, 23. Stooke, 255. 938 Andy Warhol complained about the club owner in his diary, “at Elaine’s Stevie Rubell told me he’s very rich, but
that all his money’s in assets or hidden away…Oh, and after he confessed how rich he was, he started to worry that I
only liked him for his money, and I mean, what can I say?” And a few months later, “he pretends to be so friendly,
and then he calls up the papers [to gossip.]” Shortly after the club opened, Rubell perhaps unwisely told New York
magazine, “it’s a cash business and you have to worry about the IRS. I don’t want them to know everything.”
Dorfman, 14. Lawrence, 2. Dorfman, 14. Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New

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Like Papageorge’s photographs, the club sometimes felt like something out of a fantasy.
The club’s door policy -- geared towards getting the right mix of, as doorman Marc Benecke
said, “Brooks Brothers, lawyers, doctors, the crazy, funky and wild, and the celebrities” -- has
been compared to the process of casting a film.939 Upon entering the lobby, guests were
confronted by a 1950s-era camera boom left over from the old CBS days. The club’s design had
been overseen not by nightclub designers, who were used to prioritizing functionality when
renovating post-industrial warehouse spaces, but by theater professionals.940 Depending on the
occasion, there might be fake trees draped in Spanish moss lining the entryway (Figure 5.54), an
“East Meets West” theme designed by Issey Miyake, (Figure 5.55) or the recreated hull of the
Titanic bursting through the wall. (Figure 5.56) The dress code was, on special occasions, more
like a costume code; as one club regular recalls:
I remember twenty-five guys, all dressed as King Tut and chained together. I
remember a guy in a doctor's outfit, wheeling his patient in on a stretcher, with a
tank of laughing gas attached, with twelve tubes coming out of it. This guy was
giving free hits to everybody.941
“It’s like being inside a Fellini film,” another man told the New York Times.
942 In fact, musician
Grace Jones, who performed the night Papageorge first visited the club, (Figure 5.57) came to
see that the layers of visual fantasy came to overpower the music and dancing -- the ostensible
purpose of any nightclub:
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 201, 212. Colacello, chap. 35. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed.
Pat Hackett (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1991), e-book. 939 Benecke himself was interested in acting and did TV commercials as well as runway and photographic modeling
during the day, and was therefore well acquainted with being both caster and casted. Enid Nemy, “The Last Word at
Discos Belongs to the Doormen,” New York Times, August 31, 1979, A14. madison moore, “Looks: Studio 54 and
the Production of Fabulous Nightlife,” Dancecult 5, no. 1 (2013): 71. 940 Shapiro, 208. For a study of 1970s music set against the decay of the working class and rise in inequality, see
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press, 2010. 941 Haden-Guest, 127. 942 Leslie Bennetts, “An ‘In’ Crowd and Outside Mob Show up for Studio 54’s Birthday,” New York Times, April
28, 1978, B4.

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The dancers at 54 were increasingly hired to do the dancing…rather than the club
being a place where people danced for real. Naked musclemen painted silver on
horses covered with glitter seagulls dusted with white powder became more
important than mere music. Studio 54 was an illusion, really, a very smart
setup…943
Perhaps Studio 54, land of fantasy, was the perfect place for a photographer like
Papageorge to make his work.944
Brassaï
Uninterested in capturing the social reality of Studio 54, Papageorge mentally
reconfigured the club through the lens of photographic history. He had been deeply moved by a
retrospective of Brassaï’s work curated by Szarkowski in the winter of 1969. The seventy-five
works had been made between 1932 to 1958, with subject matter ranging from nocturnal
cityscapes, to cafe life, to graffiti, to portraits. Admiring “the actuality of flesh and sweat and
desire” detailed in Brassaï’s images of nightlife, Papageorge decided to do away with his small
Leica in favor of the 6x9cm medium format his predecessor used.945 This format has the aspect
ratio of a 35mm camera, but a negative four times the size (which provides a much richer range
of middle gray tones) and, as Papageorge writes, “a gruesomely inaccurate viewfinder” which
943 Grace Jones and Paul Morley, I'll Never Write My Memoirs (New York: Gallery Books, 2015), chap. 4. e-book. 944 Maybe the most tantalizing fantasy Studio 54 inspired in ordinary people was the chance to mingle with the
extraordinary. It was, in truth, possible for an outer-borough nobody to wind up dancing next to Farah Fawcett, in
the same way it was possible to win the lottery, or fall out of an airplane without a parachute and survive. But
instead of invoking Alexis de Tocqueville to explain this, perhaps John Berger is a better guide. Owner Steve
Rubell’s obsequious catering to celebrities’ every need, chemical or otherwise, demonstrates who ultimately
mattered in the club. Perhaps outer-borough nobodies were one of those needs. “The state of being envied is what
constitutes glamor,” Berger wrote in 1972. With the tall kinetic tube lights illuminating their environment,
celebrities were ready for their close-up, and the door policy ensured that there would be enough enviers for every
envied. (In 1972, a Yugoslavian flight attendant survived a 31,000-foot fall when her plane exploded. She was not
wearing a parachute.) “Hostess, in Rear of Jet, Survived Czech Crash,” New York Times, January 29, 1972,
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/01/29/archives/hostess-in-rear-of-jet-survived-czech-crash.html. John Berger, Ways
of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (New York: Penguin, 2012), 131. 945 Papageorge, “Studio 54.”

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required him to shift the entire camera down and to the left to actually come away with a
photograph similar to what he had seen.946 Walking around with the camera and a flash, he
recalls being “burdened by so much gear that I felt like an oversized gnome tramping home after
a night of donut-making.”
“The real night people,” Brassaï once wrote, “live at night not out of necessity, but
because they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs.”947 Born
in 1899 in Brassó, Hungary, Brassaï is one of the great characters in the history of photography.
(Figure 5.58) In 1920, he left for Berlin, where he fell in with an extraordinary set of artists,
including László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Kokoschka, and Vassily Kandinsky.948 Brassaï attended
performances of recent works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók -- “intimate concerts,” he
wrote, “followed by passionate debates.”949 The works of Proust and Goethe became his north
and south stars.950 He once heard Einstein lecture.951 Four years later, he was in Paris, trying to
find two centimes to rub together, taking irregular journalism jobs, getting dispirited by the
“superficial” and “ephemeral” nature of the work.952 Hunger became a constant companion.953
Nighttime beckoned, perhaps in part because it was changing so dramatically; the first electric
street lamp in Paris had been installed in 1920.954 (When it changed again, during World War IIera blackouts, he captured the darkened church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, silhouetted against
the sky.) (Figure 5.59) “I lived at night,” he later wrote, “going to bed at sunrise, getting up at
946 Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 18. 947 Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the 30's (New York: Pantheon, 1976): unpaginated. 948 Anne Tucker, “Brassaï: Man of the World,” in Brassaï: The Eye of Paris, ed. Anne Tucker (Houston: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1999), 22.
949 Ibid. 950 Ibid 23. 951 Papageorge, chap. 4. 952 Avis Berman, “An Interview with Brassaï,” in Brassaï: The Eye of Paris, ed. Anne Tucker (Houston: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1999), 153.
953 Tucker, “Brassaï: Man of the World,” 26. 954 Ibid 31.

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sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre.”955 Although an evocative,
pungent writer, Brassaï wanted an additional medium with which he could capture the night. He
took up photography, using a 6x9 Voigtländer Bergheil camera.956 Brassaï learned how to make
accurate long exposures, use a flash, and soften harsh light with trees, fog, and rain so it
wouldn’t flood the darker zones of his images.957 Sometimes accompanied by a bodyguard, he
photographed brothels, working-class dance halls, opium dens, and “those seemingly ordinary
bars in Montmartre,” he wrote, which were in fact “owned by a clan of pimps” and “often the
scenes of bloody reckonings.”958 Brassaï also photographed the high life. Some of his finest work
on the upper classes happens to have been made during the Great Depression, which saw no
shortage of extravagant balls put on by upper crust (not unlike Studio 54’s outrageous parties
held in the depths of its city’s economic crisis.959)
When Szarkowski characterizes Brassaï’s style as “blunt, unornamented, and muscular”
he points to the photographer’s ability as a ruthless editor of the scenarios playing out in front of
him.960 In scenes such as this of a Parisian sex worker in 1931, the subject is placed centrally
against a background scrubbed of distracting elements. (Figure 5.60) To say that the scene is
“out of time” is not quite right: the women’s fashion and hair styles place us within a narrow
range of years. Instead, one might say that the image is like a dream. The details are realistic, but
the scene seems to lack the embarrassing contingencies which frustrate the ordinary artist in
search of transcendence. But to say that the images are pared down is not to imply that they are
955 A distance of about six kilometers, such a walk would take one from the Left to the Right Banks, through the
heart of the city. See Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the 30’s. 956 Anne Tucker, “Notes on Brassaï’s Photographic Technique,” in Brassaï: The Eye of Paris ed. Anne Tucker
(Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1999), 157.
957 Ibid. 958 Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the 30's. 959 Perhaps Papageorge’s professed admiration for Brassaï is unsurprising given that they both had a talented circle
of friends, cultured lifestyles, distaste for journalism, fine prose quality, and an interest in nightlife. Ibid 57.
960 “Brassaï: Photographs,” Museum of Modern Art, Press Release, October 29, 1968, 1-2.

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threadbare; Brassaï’s richly realized world is coextensive with, and the photo negative of, our
own.
While the photographs in Brassaï’s MoMA exhibition covered a broader range of topics,
one can see similarities between Brassaï’s photographs of Parisian nightlife and Papageorge’s
much later photographs of Studio 54, if in iconography rather than aesthetic refinement. A
female couple from 1932 sits at a table while the bottom of the frame is cluttered with plates,
glasses, and a pack of cigarettes.961 (Figure 5.61) A male couple (one a busboy, one perhaps a
guest) from 1970s New York stand nose-to-nose in a crowded room flirting intimately. But this
time, the dirty dishes are overhead, held aloft in the plastic busser’s bin that is, rather
unromantically, dripping liquid on their heads. (Figure 5.62) In 1932, a group of young men and
women drink and smoke cigarettes at a lower-class dance hall (described by Brassaï as a
charmless place which nailed its tables to the floor to prevent brawls.)962 In a virtuosic feat of
composition, a large mirror -- a hallmark of many of Brassaï’s nightlife photographs -- reveals
the patrons sitting across from them, but outside of the camera frame. The two arrays of people
share an uncanny resemblance, from the male-female-male-female arrangement, to the position
of hands on shoulders, to the hairstyles, to the hats, as if one were the actual mirror image of the
other, rather than a distinct image in a mirror. (Figure 5.63) Papageorge captures another
embrace in front of a mirror, although the focus seems to be the woman’s rear end, wrapped in
silvery leggings, which occupies the center of the frame. (Figure 5.64) As critic Andy Grundberg
noted in a 1981 review, Papageorge’s work is “pervaded by sensuality” yet he is “too self961 This is Brassaï’s description of Le Monocle, the establishment in which this photo was taken: “From the owner,
known as Lulu de Montparnasse, to the barmaid, from the waitresses to the hat-check girl, all the women were
dressed as men, and so totally masculine in appearance that at first glance one thought they were men. A tornado of
virility had gusted through the place and blown away all the finery, all the tricks of feminine coquetry, changing
women into boys, gangsters, policemen. Gone the trinkets. veils, ruffles! Pleasant colors, frills!” See Brassaï,
unpaginated.
962 Ibid.

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conscious to let his penchant for sexual suggestiveness run riot, so he often undercuts it with the
inclusion of a foolish gesture or an incongruous detail” -- such as the aforementioned busboy’s
dripping bucket, and the woman’s derriere.963 The doubling, which Brassaï achieves so
beautifully, is here muddled in a tangle of hair and limbs and a lack of tonal separation between
figure and ground. Furthermore, Papageorge is shooting from too far away to render it clearly,
which is perhaps part of the reason Grundberg writes, “his distanced, detached stance -- as
conveyed by his formal choices -- mitigates against convincing us that as viewers we should
care, or feel, anything in particular.”964
Mythology
If the Central Park work would be edited after the fact to illustrate a Biblical story, it
seems that Papageorge sought out scenes in the disco which were reminiscent of mythology from
the advent of the project -- not with actual “characters” he told one interviewer, but with the
uncanny mythical feeling of, for example, “Cocteau’s films from the ‘30s.”965 However, in at
least two scenes, the connection would seem to be clear and literal. One vertical frame shows
two handsome young twin brothers, golden-brown hair slicked back, sporting identical
tracksuits, both tilting their heads back. The mirror image they form together is nothing if not the
myth of Narcissus transplanted to Midtown Manhattan. (Figure 5.65) In another frame, Janus
appears resting on a silver banquette. (Figure 5.66) This is, of course, a trick played by the
foreshortening of two successive bodies in space, but it is one Papageorge has pulled off
elegantly.
963 Grundberg, “Arbitrariness Is The Enemy.” 964 Ibid. 965 Kelsey, “Tod Papageorge’s Studio.”

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In other photographs, the connection is less obvious. Multiple frames show partiers
wearing elaborate masks.966 At the end of the night, one assumes those guests removed their
masks to exit the fantasy and return to their normal lives. But in one frame, a woman appears to
remove her mask only to reveal another, even more elaborate one. (Figure 5.67) This is again a
trick of foreshortening -- a second woman next to her, face also obscured by a lavish headdress,
happens to be holding a mask, which, to the camera’s eye, appears to be a “second mask.” A man
standing next to them wearing no costume at all, perhaps a stand-in for the viewer, examines the
“first mask” in the first woman’s hand, surely about to be surprised when he looks up. The
artifice of the masks continues, layer upon layer -- just as the layering of figures, objects, and
allusions in this and other of Papageorge’s photographs creates new artifices, new relationships
between unrelated elements.967
At his best, Papageorge is capable of making sprawling, polyphonic compositions, in
which multiple independent events taking place around a room are clearly recorded in a single
frame. (Figure 5.68) The photographs are especially impressive given that the eye’s area of sharp
vision is equivalent to a thumbnail held at arm’s length. Given Papageorge’s interest in literature,
one might say that the effect is similar to that of omniscient narration, in which a free-floating,
god-like narrator can access the thoughts and motivations of any character in a story. The result
is a collage of protagonists, each one the sole hero of a given photograph.968 When made by
966 With each new party theme, the interior decor and costumes changed and could, in Papageorge’s words, “suggest
anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.” Daisy Woodward, “Inside Studio 54 with Tod Papageorge,” AnOther
Magazine, November 18, 2014, https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/4112/inside-studio-54-with-todpapageorge.
967 The layers of allusion go deep, as well. Papageorge jokes that a visitor might have seen something “torn from a
painting by Watteau or Caravaggio, depending on which part of the club you’re in.” One might have seen
something, in other words, that looked like a painting of a myth. Kelsey, “Tod Papageorge’s Studio.” 968 In his 1977 book To Destroy Painting, Louis Marin argued that Caravaggio turned away from narrative painting
as practiced by Poussin and thus “destroyed” painting. If Poussin arrayed the unfolding elements of narrative (“a
differentiated but single action”) across a deep space, Caravaggio gathered those elements in a shallow space near
the surface of the painting, “and seized [them] the way a snapshot instantaneously captures a flash of a second,” thus
removing the possibility of narrative. It could be said that by using the technique described here, Papageorge moved

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Papageorge in Studio 54, this form of photography often suggests a kind of conniving elite,
spreading rumors, stabbing backs, and undermining foes. The sheer volume of the music at the
club meant that guests had to lean into one another to hear and be heard, which heightens the
mood of conspiracy. In one frame, a woman sits on a man’s lap, arms wrapped around his neck.
(Figure 5.69) She whispers in his ear and he gives Papageorge’s camera a look of surprised
concern, implicating the viewer in some unnamed intrigue. To their left are another man and
woman, but this woman’s powers of persuasion are clearly god-like. As the man remains
oblivious, the woman sits above him, her hands on his head, fingers spread wide, clearly
implanting something nefarious in his mind.969 In another frame, an array of mortals at the
bottom of the frame, also oblivious, busy themselves in idle chatter -- one of them smirking away
to himself as he chats up a woman -- while above their heads is a trio of menacing beings.
(Figure 5.70) At left is the oily charmer, at middle the bruiser striking an aggressive pose, and at
right -- dead center and highest in the frame -- is a viperous old man in a tuxedo, with batwing
eyebrows, a sideways glance, and a wicked grin.
If the photograph’s indexical hold on the physical world seems to carry no weight for
Papageorge, its relationship to time is also up for grabs. A book of the Studio 54 work published
in 2014 is sequenced as if all the images were shot over the course of a long night.970 Beginning
quietly, revelers make their way down the front hall of the club, (Figure 5.71) start slowly
swaying to the music (as a decorative emblem of a rising sun on the wall symbolically suggests
photography closer to Poussin’s definition of painting -- or more hyperbolically, that he “destroyed photography.”
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 163, 164. 969 By choosing scenes in which people sit at varying elevations, like on these banquettes, Papageorge is able to
render individuals in a crowd clearly.
970 Smyth, 58.

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the beginning of the event) (Figure 5.72), find themselves in the teeming heart of the party’s
climax (Figure 5.73), and finally collapse in exhaustion. (Figure 5.74)
Shooting black and white film helps keep the work in the realm of the mythic. As the
chapter on Bruce Davidson suggested, color can be unruly and distracting. The color of clothing,
makeup, interior design, and of the photographic print itself (different films and photo papers
translate and retain color differently) can all pin a photograph to a moment in time, when the
photographer wants it to stand outside of time. Furthermore, Papageorge takes advantage of the
fact that the power of his flash falls off rapidly the further the light travels, helping to both mask
inconvenient details which might “break the spell” and create a clean black backdrop against
which the subject can stand out.
But within its cone of illumination, the flash is merciless. In several frames, it intimately
probes elements of interior decoration, such as these faux Greek statues, revealing their poor,
mass-produced quality. (Figures 5.75-5.76) At other times, the flash picks up stains and smudges
on walls, the dribbled remnants of spilled, sugary drinks, cigarette butts, a strip of black rubber
wall base which has the good sense to avoid touching the befouled carpet next to it.971 (Figure
5.77)
The austere majesty of the written myths Papageorge is referencing -- apparent when, for
example, Homer writes of Phoebus, “like night the god descended” -- is often lost in the
photographic translation.972 In one particularly overstuffed and confusing frame, Papageorge
shoots down at partygoers on lower levels of the bleacher seating, but their pitch-black clothing
and dark hair dissolve into the black carpeting at their feet. (Figure 5.78) The “god's-eye” view,
971 James Elkins calls such “overlooked, unneeded and unwanted details” the “surround.” James Elkins, What
Photography Is (New York: Routledge, 2011), 116. 972 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023), chap. 1, e-book.
Stevenson, 58.

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which is supposed to bring piercing clarity to the mess that is human affairs, here does the
opposite. The viewer is alienated from the myth; the spell is broken. What is left is the insistent
physical presence of the nightclub, a real place of concrete, steel, carpet, glass, and flesh. The
falseness of the photograph is the falseness Papageorge brings to it.
Ron Galella
Another photographer present at the club on New Year’s Eve 1977, the paparazzo Ron
Galella (1931-2022) had created a body of work and represented ideas about photography which
present an instructive contrast to those of Papageorge. Born into a poor Italian immigrant family
living in the Bronx, Galella learned aerial photography in the US Air Force during the Korean
War, took classes at what would become Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and in
the mid-60s began a career in New York City as a freelance paparazzo.973 Just like Papageorge,
Galella’s photographic heroes were, by sheer coincidence, Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson.974
Unlike Papageorge, Galella shot celebrities for The National Enquirer as well as fan magazines
like Photoplay and Modern Screen.
975 By the time he began his career, Hollywood studios had
lost their tight grip on both their stars and the various fan magazines which covered them.976 The
1970s in the US were a period of unusual access to celebrities, after the tightly controlled studio
days but before public relations professionals limited access, and the assassination of John
973 Aerial wartime photography is a form of surveillance, and thus qualifies as one element of Carol Squier’s fourpart definition of paparazzi photography: “it is a rough-edged hybrid that is patched together from the visual regimes
and positivist assumptions that constitute four types of photography that are practiced and consumed as if they are
distinct from one another: photojournalism; documentary; celebrity photography, which is itself a hybrid of editorial
and promotional photography; and surveillance photography. The paparazzo brings these photographies together in
a way that maximizes outrage and seems to blanket the entire medium in disgrace.” Carol Squiers, “Class Struggle:
The Invention of Paparazzi Photography and the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales,” in Over Exposed: Essays on
Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (New York: New Press, 1999), 271. Emily Nussbaum, “The Man in
the Bushes,” New York, September 22, 2008, 32. Howe, 56. 974 Ibid 28. 975 Nussbaum, 33. 976 Howe, 26.

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Lennon prompted the rich and famous to hire more rigorous security.977 Nevertheless, the job
was not easy, and Galella used a bevy of disguises (sunglasses, fake mustaches, pipes, wigs,
sombreros) and a flashy red muscle car so he could blend into ostentatious celebrity milieux.978
He crashed events, sometimes sneaking in through the kitchen or flashing forged credentials.979
For his rule-breaking, Galella was banned from Studio 54 on three different occasions.980 In his
brashness and disregard for privacy or decency, Galella was closer to his European counterparts
than to his fellow Americans. By the 1960s, photographers in Italy, Britain, and France tended to
be much more aggressive, using deception, bribery, and trespassing to get their images.981 For
example, paparazzo Settimio Garritan once pretended to be a newly hired gardener on the island
of Skorpios so he could shoot Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude, and Jacques Lange burst into a
room full of schoolchildren with a miniature camera he had hidden in a pack of cigarettes to
shoot the young Princess Caroline of Monaco taking her exams.982
Galella thought of himself as a corrective to the glamor industry, and sought out unposed
expressions and behaviors.983 “I don't want them looking in my camera,” he says, “I want them
doing something, talking to each other, being themselves. That's what I capture, their realistic
expressions rather than poses.”984 In some of Galella’s photography, hands or heads intrude into
977 Ibid 63. 978 Allan Sekula speculates that since Galella’s disguises were so absurdly obvious, he must have preferred
recognition and confrontation over being ignored. In fact, early paparazzi in postwar Italy traveled in pairs so one
person could bait a celebrity into attacking them and the other could capture the event on film. Howe, 59. Allan
Sekula, “Paparazzo Notes,” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983. (Halifax: The
Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 30. Ron Galella, Jacqueline (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1974), 71, 76. Stephen Fenichell, “A Quiet Afternoon at Home with Ron Galella,” American Photo, JulyAugust 1992, 81.
979 Galella, Jacqueline, 76. 980 Haden-Guest, 10. 981 Howe, 30. 982 Ibid. 983 Nussbaum, 36. 984 Kate Fillion, “‘Celebrities who say, ‘no pictures,’ they're doing it for a game. If they say they're private, they
create more mystery.’ Paparazzo Ron Galella talks with Kate Fillion about Madonna, Jackie O, Britney and why
stars deserve the paparazzi,” Maclean's, December 8, 2008, 16.

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the edges of the frame, giving the images a slapdash, stolen quality which reads to many viewers
as unpremeditated and tantalizingly “real.” (Figure 5.79) (Italian paparazzi as early as the late
1940s learned to falsify this look, by including distracting elements like tree branches in the
frame, or later by shooting with new telephoto lenses from across the street -- even when it was
not necessary to get the shot.985)
In Galella’s case, this is at least partly due to his (frequently and defensively evoked)
status as an outsider.986 He once said “paparazzi photography is not about events” -- i.e.
prearranged red carpet unveilings -- “it's about creating another photo op: at their apartment after
the event, perhaps, or no event at all, you just follow someone going to dinner.”987 Galella has
argued that a freelancer would “starve” unless he went out and made something happen for
himself.988 Yet “rarely do I call a star's name,” to get their attention.989 “I hate doing that, like
you're begging for a picture,” he continued. “They're too rich. I'm the worker. They don't know
what it is to work.”990 Operating without the comforts of the court portraitist, he had to take what
he could get: “I’m very quick, that was the technique: fast-shoot, fast-shoot! I don’t even look
through the viewfinder.”991 Literally and figuratively on the “outside,” Galella can be considered
something of a street photographer -- although he was one who was eager to get inside by any
means necessary.992
985 Howe, 59. 986 Galella was “given to garrulous self-justification, as though he felt incapable of standing on his work alone,” in
Allan Sekula’s words. Sekula, “Paparazzo Notes,” 24. 987 Fillion, 16. 988 Ibid. 989 Ibid. 990 Ibid. 991 Nussbaum, 36. 992 I credit Vanessa Schwartz for the idea of Galella as street photographer.

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Galella’s images often show celebrities emerging from inky blackness, the result of
Galella’s fast shutter speed combined with a strong flash.993 (Figure 5.80) Whether or not this
was his intention, this technique removed some of the banalities inevitably populating the
backgrounds of his frames made under such improvised circumstances. (And by enclosing the
subject in a shallow space close to the camera/viewer, the flash effect overcomes Galella’s own
antagonistic relationship with celebrity, providing the viewer with an illusion of intimacy with
their social superior.)
Galella was forced by the economics of the editorial model to shoot each subject
extensively enough that the resulting set of photographs could support any number of rumors or
fabrications the hiring publication wanted to amplify.994 This is perhaps why he spent so much of
New Year’s Eve 1977 at Studio 54 photographing one clique composed of Liza Minnelli, her
husband, producer Jack Haley, Jr., socialite Bianca Jagger, and fashion designer Halston.
Minnelli had been having affairs since at least early 1977 and seems to have done little to hide
it.995 As Andy Warhol noted in his diary a few days after New Year’s Eve:
She was walking down the street with Jack Haley her husband and they’d run into
Martin Scorsese who she’s now having an affair with, and Marty confronted her
that she was also having an affair with Baryshnikov and Marty said how could she.
This is going on with her husband, Jack Haley, standing there!”996
As speculation swirled in the tabloids, Galella grabbed the opportunity to obtain
grist for the rumor mill. Some frames could be read to suggest that Minnelli and Jagger
are entwined in intimate conversation and have frozen out both a surprised Halston and
993 Flint, 216. 994 The example Sekula provides is the cover story of the March 1972 issue of Photoplay, the headline of which read
“SERVANT TALKS! THE NIGHT ARI WARNED JACKIE: "I'M LEAVING YOU!" HOW SHE GOT HIM TO
TAKE HER BACK.” With just a few more minutes of shooting, Sekula argues, Galella could have easily made
enough photos to argue the exact opposite point about Onassis. Sekula, “Paparazzo Notes,” 24. 995 Vincent A. Lo Brutto, Martin Scorsese: A Biography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 359. 996 Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, no chapter.

227
an uncomfortable Haley. (Figure 5.81) Other frames reassure the reader that no such
thing could ever happen, that the four are close as could be, that if anyone is jealous and
frozen out, it is the unnamed and anxious hanger-on at far left. (Figure 5.82) Minnelli
and Haley denied the rumors for weeks before publicly announcing their breakup in
March 1978.997
Thus, just like Papageorge, Galella’s work is narrative, and each frame must ultimately
submit to what Sekula calls the “logic of literary invention.”998 For both, the photograph can be
wrestled into almost any story: the celebrity is happily married, the celebrity is seeking a divorce;
the man on the dancefloor is a clerk from Atlanta, the man on the dancefloor is the god Apollo.
The paparazzo and the professor are closer than they appear at first sight.
Brooke Shields
Given Studio 54’s reputation for famous guests, Papageorge includes few recognizable
people in his photographs. This may be because the photographer, stuck in an ivory tower, had
never learned who these celebrities were in the first place. Or maybe it is due to the fact that
celebrities often -- but not always -- congregated out of sight in the basement VIP area. More
likely, it was a deliberate choice meant to keep the work in the realm of the (at least potentially)
mythic; after all, a piece of photographic art which happens to include a famous face instantly
becomes a “celebrity photograph.” An exception to this rule of absence is a photograph of
Brooke Shields, shown small in a roaring crowd in the thirty-sixth photograph in Papageorge’s
book. (Figure 5.83) She would have been between thirteen and fifteen years old, although it is
hard to say given the lack of captions. As a famous model and actor, Shields, accompanied by
997 Kathleen Brady, “Liza and Husband Jack Haley Agree on a Separation,” Australian Women’s Weekly, March 29,
1978, 8.
998 Ibid.

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her mother, had been able to skirt the state’s nightclub laws, which at that time put the minimum
age at eighteen.999
At the exact moment Papageorge was photographing in Studio 54, Shields was at the
center of a fervent national debate about images of child nudity. Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby,
which briefly featured a nude eleven-year-old Shields, opened in the US in April 1978.1000
(Figure not shown) The resulting furor was detailed in a People magazine cover story, among
other places, the following month.1001 (Figure 5.84) In 1980, she appeared partly nude in Blue
Lagoon, generating yet more controversy.1002 (Figure not shown) In fact, photographs of her
nude body had been in wide circulation since the age of eleven months, when Francesco
Scavullo photographed her in for a 1966 Ivory soap advertisement. (Figure 5.85) The image is
benign; the mother character is the focal point and the child is shown from the waist up, turned
away from the camera. Scavullo photographed her again in 1975, when she was about ten years
of age, from the waist up, facing the camera with her arms by her side. (Figure not shown) A
cropped version of the photograph later appeared in an advertisement for a NBC News story
alongside the caption, “World’s Youngest Sex Symbol?”1003 (Figure 5.86) Taken with Scavullo’s
signature style of spare classicism, the photograph shows what would become a recurring theme
999 Unlike Drew Barrymore, another child star who had been introduced to Studio 54 by her mother, Shields avoided
drugs and alcohol at the club, and spent most of her time dancing. Papageorge’s photograph does not show the
object of the crowd’s attention, but Shields recalls in her autobiography that “excursions to Studio 54 were always
connected to some event. It might have been a Warhol party, a Calvin Klein launch, or a film premiere.” Simon
Hattenstone, “Drew Barrymore: ‘My Mother Locked Me Up In An Institution At 13. Boo hoo! I Needed It,’”
Guardian, October 25, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/oct/25/drew-barrymore-mother-locked-upin-institution-interview. Shields, There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, chap. 9. Ibid.
Jeffrey Schmalz, “New York Raising its Drinking Age to 21 in December,” New York Times, June 19, 1985,
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/19/nyregion/new-york-raising-its-drinking-age-to-21-in-december.html. 1000 Kristen Hatch, “‘A Woman’s Face and a Child’s Body’: Brooke Shields and Child Sexuality,” Celebrity Studies
14, no. 2 (2023): 169.
1001 “Off the Screen,” People, May 29, 1978. 1002 Owen Gleiberman, “‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ Review: A Documentary of Fascinating Depth Holds Our
Voyeuristic Image Culture Up to the Light,” Variety, January 20, 2023,
https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/pretty-baby-brooke-shields-review-1235496742. 1003 Hatch, 159.

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in the discourse around Shields: the difference between her fierce, adult-like, facial features, and
her child’s body.1004 The theme of duality appeared in the title of the book Sugar and Spice,
released by Playboy Press in 1976, two years before Papageorge began his (altogether different)
project. The publisher had commissioned the aptly named Garry Gross to shoot a series of
photographs of little girls in the nude for a section entitled “The Woman in the Child.”1005
Shields was one of these girls. The photographs are not reproduced here, but suffice it to say that
they look like what they are: child pornography, although gussied up with steam, body oil, arty
props, and an all-over, 24-carat golden hue which would have, on its own, disqualified the work
had Gross’ sheer immorality not done so first. Gross then licensed two of the most revealing
photographs to be displayed as larger-than-life prints in the windows of a boutique on Fifth
Avenue, and then “in at least five publications, some of them decidedly disreputable,” as one
later court document put it.1006 As a teenager, Shields sued Gross to prevent further sale of the
photographs on the grounds that they violated her “federal constitutional right of privacy” and
that they would cause her “irreparable harm, embarrassment and personal distress.”1007 Judge
Edward Greenfield rejected her argument, but not because he viewed the photographs as
fictional, distinct from Shields’ person, and therefore incapable of invading her privacy. In fact,
he acknowledged that the photographs would “embarrass” her, and he scolded Shields’ mother
for having allowed the photo shoot to take place.1008 Instead, he decided the case on the basis of
New York state contract law, which abrogated children’s common law right to disaffirm a
1004 Ibid. 1005 As it happens, Gross had apprenticed to Francesco Scavullo after graduating from City College. Dennis Hevesi,
“Garry Gross Is Dead at 73; Photographer of Clothes and Their Absence,” New York Times, December 7, 2010,
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/arts/design/07gross.html. Hatch, 164.
1006 Shields v. Gross, 563 F. Supp. 1253 (S.D.N.Y. 1983). 1007 Ibid. 1008 Madalynne Reuter, “Photographer Wins Right to Sell Brooke Shields Photos,” Publishers Weekly 221 (1982):
24. Annie Laurie Gaylor, “Media Watch: Misogyny in Media,” Feminist Connection, January 1982, 22.

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contract in favor of parental consent -- something Teri Shields had given in writing -- on behalf
of minors.1009 Greenfield thus resolved the lawsuit with sound legal reasoning (but,
bewilderingly, not before praising Gross as a photographer of “extraordinary talent” and the girls
as having “sultry sensual appeal.”)1010 A baseline of indexical truth was thus confirmed in a court
case related to photographs of Brooke Shields: photographs point to reality and implicate their
makers and viewers.
Conclusion
Papageorge’s first love was poetry, and with the tightly-knit group including Garry
Winogrand and John Szarkowski, he worked hard to reframe photography in poetic, i.e. fictional,
terms. “Don’t speak to me of the document,” he once told the Magnum photographer Alec Soth.
“A picture’s not the world, but a new thing.”1011 For Papageorge, Studio 54 was not a news story
to be covered like it was for most other photographers present, but “a sourcebook of possibility, a
storehouse of material” with which he could fabricate his photographic dreams.1012 The fact that
a photograph contains a trace of the world seems to have no bearing on Papageorge’s thinking.
To confer special importance on a photograph because it was written in light is like conferring
special importance on a poem because it was written in ink; to Papageorge, it is all fiction.
“Photographs are not more or less true,” he writes, “but more or less coherent and achieved.”1013
Instead of social truth, it is this formal coherence he searches for, and when he finds it, it takes
1009 Samuel Davis and Mortimer Schwartz, Children’s Rights and the Law (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books,
1987), 30.
1010 The judge limited Gross’ ability to sell the photographs to non-pornographic publications. In a livid op-ed in The
Feminist Connection, Annie Laurie Gaylor asked rhetorically, “won’t such photos make any publication buying
them pornographic?” See Gaylor, 22. “Brooke Shields Loses Court Case,” New York Times, March 30, 1983,
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/30/nyregion/brooke-shields-loses-court-case.html. 1011 Papageorge, Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, chap. 15. 1012 Ibid chap. 9. 1013 Ibid chap. 14.

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the shape of human figures entwined within the two dimensions of a print. Yet the choice
between positivist claims of total photographic objectivity and epistemological blackout is a false
one, as Allan Sekula noted in an essay written the very year Papageorge began his project in the
disco.1014 As this chapter has argued, beyond this surface-level design reside other traces,
irrefutable and often painful, on bodies and on cities, which can affirm what the camera shows
us.
1014 Buchloh, 196. Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of
Representation,)” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983 (Halifax, Canada: Press
of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 58.

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CONCLUSION
This dissertation has examined four case studies, occurring across three dark decades of
New York City history, in which photographers have pictured infrastructure in decline. When
functioning properly, the smooth movements in circuits of electricity, transportation, and
entertainment allowed these circuits to stay in the background. As they broke down, they became
visible, in no small part due to the efforts of these four photographers. Yet these photographers’
medium also became newly visible at this time, as the supposedly natural revelatory power of the
camera was undermined from all sides, including by these photographers. René Burri was caught
by surprise by the Northeast Blackout of 1965, along with 30 million other people, and,
stumbling in the dark, shoved several rolls of film of unknown sensitivity into his pockets. He
spent the night shooting on the street, as bewildered by what had befallen the city around him as
he was unsure of how his camera would work under these conditions. Bruce Davidson, as he
often did, started with a news story but veered inwards. With his subway work, he used wildly
expressive lighting and color to reimagine mass transit in the darkest possible terms. For Alvin
Baltrop, the camera’s piercing eye had to be restrained somehow, given the other, often
menacing gazes to which the gay waterfront community was subjected. He achieved a kind of
partial veiling in his photographs through a variety of often clever and elegant formal devices.
Finally, Tod Papageorge, believing the camera had no purchase on reality whatsoever, used it
instead to create woven designs reminiscent of myth, and in doing so, represents a kind of
“bridge too far” in the skeptic’s questioning of photography.
Far from diminishing human knowledge, however, this metaphorically “dark” moment in
photography history -- and other “darknesses” as well -- retain value. On March 7, 1970, the
Moon slipped directly between the Earth and the Sun, casting a 100-mile-wide shadow across

233
New York City, part of what astronomers called “the eclipse of the century.”1015 (Figure 6.1)
Ninety-six percent of the sun was blocked in the city, causing a brief, four degree drop in
temperature in Central Park -- although the eclipse was total in nearby areas. By early afternoon,
the city’s skyscrapers and avenues were sunk in gloom, as crowds gathered at street corners and
in parks to watch. (Figure 6.2) To observers in the path of the total eclipse, the furious, boiling
gasses of the corona -- the usually invisible periphery of the Sun -- leapt into view. The corona
was then near the peak of its 11-year cycle, and dramatic solar flares were seen forming a
burning mane around the star. Mercury and Venus also appeared clearly in the deep midnight
blue sky, as well as faint comets circling the sun, all normally obscured by the glowing giant at
the center. Scientists raced to collect data while they had the chance, launching twenty-one
suborbital rockets from Wallops Island, Virginia, and assigning seven satellites to track the
event, in what the National Science Foundation called the “most comprehensive … study of a
solar eclipse in history.”1016
A photograph made for the Boston Globe shows a young boy on a plane en route to
Nantucket, where the eclipse would be total.1017 (Figure 6.3) He looks through a piece of fully
exposed and blackened 4x5” film he holds up to the plane’s window. The photograph is a classic
example of 20th century newspaper photography. It is meant to be seen through, not looked at.
With a minimum of ornamentation or personal interpretation, the photograph describes a method
for safely viewing an eclipse that even children can grasp. But the photograph wrongly implies
that the eclipse is happening at this very moment (and perhaps that this clever child had the
1015 The last comparable eclipse in the US had occurred almost a hundred years prior, in 1878, and the next
comparable one is expected to occur in 2024. Walter Sullivan, “Vast Plans Set for Solar ʻEclipse of the Century,ʼ”
New York Times, February 23, 1970, 1. 1016 John Noble Wilford, “Millions Watch Eclipse in Clear Skies; An Eerie Twilight Falls Briefly Here,” New York
Times, March 8, 1970, 1. 1017 Robert Reinhold, “Chilled Throngs See Shadow in Nantucket,” New York Times, March 8, 1970,
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/08/archives/chilled-throngs-see-shadow-in-nantucket.html.

234
foresight to bring the blackened film with him above the clouds which obstruct the view of those
below.) Only frames this photographer made later, upon arrival in Nantucket, show amateur
astronomers viewing the actual short-lived astronomical event. (Figure 6.4) It seems the
photographer had asked the boy to pose for the shot on the airplane. This was a common and
innocent enough transgression, but one which is masked here by the transparency of the
photograph -- or one could say by the medium’s smoothly operating “circuit” of information.
Meanwhile, the boy is engaged in his own photographic act, one of film-mediated vision, but this
time, the “circuit” is blocked to all but the strongest rays of light. He sees the tiny burning dot of
the Sun through the film, but he also sees, in the glossy black surface of the film, his own
reflection; he sees himself seeing. Just as the infrastructures of electricity, transportation, and
entertainment described in this dissertation came into visibility as they broke down, the medium
of photography does the same for this boy. But far from invalidating what he sees through the
film, this self-reflexivity deepens his grasp of it. Self-reflexive seeing is also a lesson we can
draw from a much more recent example.
Decades after the eclipse, the New York City-based artist David Hammons’ sculpture
Day’s End (2014-2021), a tribute to Gordon Matta-Clark’s work of the same title, rose out of the
Hudson River. (Figure 6.7) Built to the exact dimensions of the long-vanished Pier 52, and
located on the same site, Hammons’ Day’s End eschews the hulking mass of rust and rot of the
original in favor of pale grey, matte-textured steel tubing.1018 The material both evokes the light
pencil lines of Hammons’ proposal sketch (Figure 6.5) and suggests something of the ghostly
and ephemeral. If Matta-Clark sought to undo architecture’s power over human bodies by
1018 Holland Cotter, “From David Hammons, a Tribute to Pier 52 and Lastingness,” New York Times, May 13, 2021,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/arts/design/david-hammons-pier-whitney.html?searchResultPosition=1.

235
creating openings where none existed, Hammons’ sculpture very nearly completes this task.1019
Lacking floors, ceiling, or walls, and consisting of only these slender metallic outlines, the work
is something that can be both looked at and looked through. In fact, the work’s connection to
vision is little remarked upon in reviews. It is easy to suggest (often melancholic) connections
between Hammons’ Day’s End and New York City maritime shipping history, or cruising, or the
gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood -- to frame the piece, in other words, as a ghost,
or as a memorial. In light of the connections I draw in this dissertation, one might also consider
both Day’s Ends in terms of photography. With its darkened void and massive, west-facing
oculus, Matta-Clark’s original intervention turned Pier 52 into something of a camera.
Hammons’ later version pares down the body of the machine until we are left with something
close to pure camera vision. The slender lines of the sculpture’s construction recall the faint grey
guide lines etched into a 4x5” camera’s ground glass. (Figure ) (Such cameras are often used to
photograph architecture due to their ability to remove the “keystone” distortion which makes
buildings appear to narrow as they rise.) The metal tubing self-reflexively creates frames,
windows, and vanishing points as clearly as a diagram in a photography textbook. Through the
sculpture -- the ghost of the city’s ruined infrastructure -- we see the world beyond. The
infrastructure may be gone, but, like Hammons’ sculpture, which is built on public land and
which will be maintained by the Whitney Museum in perpetuity, the lessons in seeing will
remain with us.
1019 Lee, 26.

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APPENDIX: Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 1.1
The signs of Times Square lit up at night, 1927.
Schenectady Museum/Hall of Electrical History Foundation/Corbis via Getty Images

280
Figure 1.2
A large crowd gathers outside of Studio 54, hoping to get in. 1978.
John Barrett -- PHOTOlink/Alamy

281
Figure 1.3
US Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953.
Ullstein bild via Getty Images

282
Figure 1.4
January 2, 1944 front page of the New York Times.

283
Figure 1.5
December 30, 1978 front page of the New York Times.

284
Figure 1.6
Police and demonstrators are in a melee near the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Chicago's Michigan
Avenue on August 28th, 1968 during the Democratic National Convention.
Bettmann/Getty Images

285
Figure 1.7
Italian Family Seeking Lost Luggage, Ellis Island, 1905
Lewis Hine
National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress

286
Figure 1.8
A cavalry soldier looks through a “starlight scope” that is attached to an M16 rifle in Vietnam on
January 13, 1967. The “starlight” is a device that intensifies moon and reflected starlight
hundreds of times and is used by U.S. armed forces all over Vietnam to spot the enemy at night.
Johner/AP Photo

287
Figure 1.9
The ZEISS Planar f/0.7 50mm lens was, at the time of its creation, the “fastest” lens in the world,
meaning that its aperture could open extremely wide, allowing it to shoot in very dark situations.
ZEISS Museum of Optics

288
Figure 1.10
Actors Patrick Magee and Ryan O'Neal gamble by candlelight in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film
Barry Lyndon.
Everett Collection

289
Figure 1.11
Old main railroad station in Frankfurt, Germany in 1962.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

290
Figure 1.12
Postcard from the 1964-65 New York City World’s Fair featuring an aerial photograph of the
Kodak Pavilion.
World's Fairs. “Kodak Pavilion Postcard 1964-1965.” Accessed July 19, 2024.
http://www.worldsfairs.amdigital.co.uk.libproxy1.usc.edu/Documents/Details/HML_2538d.

291
Figure 1.13
An advertisement for Kodak’s Instamatic camera in the back of a pamphlet Kodak distributed at
the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
Kodak At The Fair: Under The Picture Tower A World Of Adventure In The Kodak Pavilion
(Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Company, 1964), unpaginated.

292
Figure 1.14
The Kodak Pavilion at night, during the New York World's Fair, Flushing Meadows, New York
City, New York, 1964.
Morse Collection/Gado/Getty Images

293
Figure 1.15
To create the Kodak Pavilion’s giant photographs, technicians had sliced the 8x10” negatives
into twelve strips, inserted them one at a time into a towering horizontal enlarger, and projected a
powerful light through them onto twelve corresponding, massive strips of photo-sensitive paper
which had been vacuum-sealed to the wall.
Bob Hering, “World’s Largest Color Prints,” Popular Science, May 1964, 161.

294
Figure 1.16
A technical diagram of the giant photography display crowning the Kodak Pavilion at the 1964-
65 World’s Fair. A complex vacuum system hidden inside the circular display held the
photographs in place, and massive banks of hidden lights illuminated it from below.
Bob Hering, “World’s Largest Color Prints,” Popular Science, May 1964, 158.

295
Figure 1.17
“A Wet Night on the Embankment,” 1896.
Paul Martin -- Victoria and Albert Museum, London

296
Figure 1.18
“London By Gaslight,” American Amateur Photographer 8, no. 11 (November 1, 1896): 468.
Photograph by Paul Martin.

297
Figure 1.19
“Night Photography,” Photographic Times: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the
Interests of Artistic and Scientific Photography 29, no. 4 (April 1897): 161. Photograph by
William A. Fraser.

298
Figure 1.20
“The Savoy Hotel, Stormy Night,” photograph from the article “Night Photography,”
Photographic Times: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Interests of Artistic and
Scientific Photography 29, no. 4 (April 1897): 163. Photograph by William A. Fraser.

299
Figure 1.21
Savoy Hotel, New York, 1897.
Alfred Stieglitz -- Art Institute of Chicago

300
Figure 1.22
Edward Steichen, “The Flatiron--Evening,” 1904.
Estate of Edward Steichen

301
Figure 1.23
“In the Luxembourg Gardens,” 1879
John Singer Sargent
Philadelphia Museum of Art

302
Figure 1.24
September 22, 1938 front page of New York Daily News. “Many Dead In Hurricane, Bodies Cast
On L.I. Shore; Subways Stop; Hotels Dark.”
New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

303
Figure 1.25
Lower Manhattan in New York looked like this during a 20-minute test blackout, March 25,
1942. The area covered by the blackout extended five square miles, from the Battery north to
14th Street. Lights at bottom are boats in the East River and reflections in Brooklyn. Lights at
left are from the New Jersey shore, which wasn’t affected by the blackout.
Tom Fitzsimmons -- AP

304
Figure 1.26
New York Times coverage of the February 8, 1971 blackout.

305
Figure 1.27
The photograph, overlaid with text, accompanying the New York Herald Tribune’s 1965 series
“New York City in Crisis.”

306
Figure 1.28
A vacant lot appears with a stripped car at Findlay Avenue and East 165th St. in the South Bronx
on January 4, 1973.
Anthony Pescatore/New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

307
Figure 1.29
A map of New York City shows the location of the “Son of Sam” murders of 1976 and 1977.
Getty Images

308
Figure 1.30
Police escort handcuffed Son of Sam suspect David Berkowitz into police headquarters in lower
Manhattan.
Alan Aaronson -- New York Daily News via Getty Images

309
Chapter 1 - René Burri’s Camera Vision and the 1965 Blackout
Figure 2.1
New York City, 1978.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

310
Figure 2.2
Portrait of Hans Finsler, teacher of “Fotoklasse” at the Zürich School of Art and Design,
Switzerland, 1957.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

311
Figure 2.3
Poster for Film und Foto. 1929.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn
Lauder Fund

312
Figure 2.4
Service (Clematis model; Langenthal porcelain factory); undated [after 1935]
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

313
Figure 2.5
Fold-out brochure for the Wohnbedarf AG Christmas exhibition; 1953.
Design: Richard Paul Lohse; Photos: Hans Finsler.
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

314
Figure 2.6
Electric bulb with parts of the socket, 1928.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

315
Figure 2.7
Left: Cowper, Seen from below. Blast furnace plant. Herrenwyk. Right: Iron shoe for fabrication.
From Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schön. Einhundert photographische Aufnahmen (The
world is beautiful: One hundred photographic images). Munich: Einhorn-Verl, 1928.
Museum of Modern Art Library, New York.
© 2014/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

316
Figure 2.8
Textile (close-up instructions index card No. 635) ca 1941.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

317
Figure 2.9
Tissue paper storage; 1935/36
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

318
Figure 2.10
Textile production (F. M. Hämmerle, Dornbirn); 1935/36
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

319
Figure 2.11
Roter Turm (Red Tower), Halle, Germany. Date unknown.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

320
Figure 2.12
Roter Turm (Red Tower), Halle, Germany. Date unknown.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

321
Figure 2.13
Giebichenstein Bridge, Halle, Germany. Date unknown.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

322
Figure 2.14
Giebichenstein Bridge, Halle, Germany. Date unknown.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

323
Figure 2.15
Immeuble Clarté, Geneva, facade detail; 1932
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

324
Figure 2.16
Immeuble Clarté, Geneva. A two-story living room with furniture by Marcel Breuer and a
painting by Hans Arp, 1932.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

325
Figure 2.17
Carousel in Lunapark near Bellevue. Zürich Light Week, October 1932.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

326
Figure 2.18
Light sculptures, signposts, Globus department store, railway station bridge seen from Central
Zürich. Light Week, October 1932.
Hans Finsler
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

327
Figure 2.19
Burri’s photography classmates photographed on a school trip to Venice. Book maquette, 1951.
Unknown [René Burri?]
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

328
Figure 2.20
Kindergarten Riedenhalden, Affoltern, Zürich, 1953. From BIGA diploma thesis, Zürich
University of Art and Design.
René Burri
From Hans Finsler und die Schweizer Fotokultur: Werk, Fotoklasse, Moderne Gestaltung, 1932-
1960, edited by Thilo Koenig & Martin Gasser, Zürich: Gta Verlag, 2006.

329
Figure 2.21
Cover, Zurcher Illustrierte 36 (September 8, 1939) Photography by Gotthard Schuh. Original in
color.

330
Figure 2.22
“After rain” (left), “Macy-Parade” (right) on double page spread in Camera 12 (December
1949), 366-367.
Robert Frank

331
Figure 2.23
At a special school for deaf-mute children which teaches them to “hear” through their vibratory
senses, a child concentrates on the tambourine through which he “hears” the amplified beats of
the piano. Zürich, Switzerland. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

332
Figure 2.24
At a special school for deaf-mute children, children touch the piano with their hands, forehead or
temple in order to “hear” the vibration of the music. Two children hold sticks, and when they
hear a “forte,” they hit them together. Zürich, Switzerland. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

333
Figure 2.25
At a special school for deaf-mutes, the children take their first dancing lessons. Zürich,
Switzerland. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

334
Figure 2.26
“Touch of Music for the Deaf.” Life, July 11, 1955, 95. Photographs by René Burri -- Magnum
Photos.

335
Figure 2.27
“Le Corbusier,” Du 6 (1961): 19-31. Photograph by René Burri -- Magnum Photos Digital
Archive.

336
Figure 2.28
“Le Corbusier,” Du, 6 (1961): 19-31. Photograph by René Burri -- Magnum Photos

337
Figure 2.29
Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp, designed by Le Corbusier. Windows where
painted glass panels will be mounted. Most of the slits for light widen to the interior of the
edifice, some however on the exterior; the openings thus mediate between the two different
areas. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

338
Figure 2.30
Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp. Simple meal in a make-shift wooden construction,
which provided shelter for the celebrations. Le Corbusier is sitting next to the Bishop of
Besançon. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

339
Figure 2.31
Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp. Inauguration of chapel. [Person lighting candle.]
1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

340
Figure 2.32
Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp. Inauguration of chapel. 1955.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

341
Figure 2.33
“Atelier 35 S". Le Corbusier’s private office at 7th. 35, rue de Sèvres, Paris, France. At left:
lithograph of the “Modulor” and at right a painting, both by Le Corbusier. 1959.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

342
Figure 2.34
The painter, architect and city planner Le Corbusier in his Paris apartment-studio. 1959.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

343
Figure 2.35
In Le Corbusier's penthouse flat and studio (which he designed between 1931 and 1934) are
mementos of the architect's mother and his wife, Yvonne Gallis, who died in 1957. 1959.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

344
Figure 2.36
Letter from Le Corbusier to René Burri. February 6, 1962.

345
Figure 2.37
A man rides his bicycle through the Var department, Hyères, France. 1932.
Henri Cartier-Bresson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

346
Figure 2.38
Schematic total binocular field of view (gray area); the dotted frame is a rectangle with a 3:2
width/height aspect ratio.
From Ulrich Teubner and Hans Josef Brückner, Optical Imaging and Photography: Introduction
to Science and Technology of Optics, Sensors and Systems (Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 21.

347
Figure 2.39
São Paulo, Brazil. 1960.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

348
Figure 2.40
One’s perspective on distant objects varies very little, even if they do not occupy the same plane.
This contributes to the “compression” effect of telephoto images.
The author.

349
Figure 2.41
[The Edge of the Broad] 1893, photogravure
Peter Henry Emerson
Getty Museum

350
Figure 2.42
Cross-section of the Dallmeyer telephoto lens, 1891
From T.R. Dallmeyer, Telephotography (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 135.

351
Figure 2.43
From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photograph by René Burri -- Magnum Photos.

352
Figure 2.44
From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photographs by René Burri -- Magnum Photos.

353
Figure 2.45
From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photographs by René Burri -- Magnum Photos.

354
Figure 2.46
From “Brasilia,” Paris-Match, May 1960. Photographs by René Burri -- Magnum Photos.

355
Figure 2.47
Tokyo, Japan. Sports Day. 1980.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

356
Figure 2.48
Champs Elysées, Paris, France. July 14, 1973. [Crowd viewing the Bastille Day parade.]
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

357
Figure 2.49
Mercado Modelo, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil from “Bahia: Porträt einer Stadt [Bahia: Portrait of a
City]” Du 27 (January 1967): 502-564. Photograph by René Burri -- Magnum Photos.

358
Figure 2.50
Frontispiece to Anton Wilhelm Schowart, Der Adeliche Hofemeister. Frankfurt: Hartmann, 1693.
The illustration of a staircase a young aristocrat must ascend demonstrates a spatial conception of
knowledge.

359
Figure 2.51
An undated aerial reconnaissance photograph of World War I trench networks at Le Plantin,
France.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

360
Figure 2.52
Anthropologist Marcel Griaule photographs from a clifftop near Sanga, Africa as
ethnomusicologist Andre Schaeffner holds him by the ankles. October-November 1931.
From James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 68.

361
Figure 2.53
Ernesto Guevara (Che), Argentinian politician, Minister of Industry for Cuba (1961-1965) during
an exclusive interview in his office in Havana, Cuba. 1963.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

362
Figure 2.54
“The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway System and Profile.”
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District
www.lre.usace.army.mil/Portals/69/Recreation/SooLocks/profile%20and%20system.pdf.

363
Figure 2.55
First known view of Niagara Falls, published in Father Louis Hennepin's New Discovery
published in Utrecht in 1697. He was the first white man to describe the falls in detail, while
accompanying La Salle's expedition of 1678.
Three Lions/Getty Images

364
Figure 2.56
Passengers stranded in a New York City subway train caught between stations are led along the
tracks by policemen. Some 800,000 people were in the subway when the November 9, 1965
blackout struck.
Bettmann/Getty Images

365
Figure 2.57
People line up to use a pay telephone outside the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company
Building at 270 Park Avenue during the power failure in New York on November 9, 1965.
Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

366
Figure 2.58
Front page of the November 10, 1965 issue of the New York Times featuring coverage of the
blackout.

367
Figure 2.59
An engraving depicts a Purpura, a genus of sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks in the family
Muricidae, with which Phoenicians made Tyrian cloth. Circa 19th century.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

368
Figure 2.60
Advice on how to see best in the dark. “Plane can be seen against night sky best if eye scans
circle around it. Direct look at plane (right) beclouds its image, due to night-blindness of the dayvision cone cells.”
“Night Vision,” Life, October 5, 1942.

369
Figure 2.61
Professor John Zubek and an assistant prepare the sensory deprivation dome in his lab at
University of Manitoba in 1959.
Winnipeg Free Press

370
Figure 2.62
Distribution of photoreceptors in the human retina. (A) Cones are present at a low density
throughout the retina, with a sharp peak in the center of the fovea (the foveola). Conversely, rods
are present at high density throughout most of the retina, with a sharp decline in the fovea; rods
are absent in the foveola. Boxes show face-on sections through the outer segments of the
photoreceptors at different eccentricities.
From Dale Purves, et al., Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press), 245.

371
Figure 2.63
The information booth in New York City’s Grand Central Station during the 1965 blackout.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

372
Figure 2.64
“All Day in Grand Central Station,” New York Times, February 24, 1924, 3.

373
Figure 2.65
An advertisement in New York City’s Grand Central Station during the 1965 blackout.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

374
Figure 2.66
During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

375
Figure 2.67
During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

376
Figure 2.68
During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

377
Figure 2.69
During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965. [Digitally darkened by the author.]
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

378
Figure 2.70
During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965. [Digitally brightened by the author.]
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

379
Figure 2.71
During a power shortage in Manhattan. 1965.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

380
Figure 2.72
Plan of the Island of New York in North America, but only from the eastern side in the Vicinity
of the late Fort Washington, afterwards Knyphausen, which was taken in the month of May 1779
from the Laurel Hill, but first drawn in the month of January 1781 in the Hut encampment near
Fort Knyphausen.
D. T. Valentine and George Hayward

381
Figure 2.73
Aerial view of New York with insets of famous buildings ca. 1880. Pen-and-wash drawing.
Accession number: 38.76
Unique identifier: MNY104741
Museum of the City of New York

382
Chapter 2 - Bruce Davidson’s Underground Nightmare
Figure 3.1
A Transit Authority police officer with a German shepherd stands in a subway car as a crime
deterrent, New York City, September 12, 1981.
Allan Tannenbaum -- Getty Images

383
Figure 3.2
New York City subway, 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

384
Figure 3.3
Nazis select prisoners on the platform at the entrance of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination
camp.
Yad Vashem Archives/AFP via Getty Images

385
Figure 3.4
New York. 1953. Light House Mission.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

386
Figure 3.5
New York. 1953. Light House Mission.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

387
Figure 3.6
On the set of the 1966 Mark Robson war film The Lost Command, local children pretend to be
the actors by “playing dead.” The photographer asked a friend, an American-educated priest, to
step into the frame. Reproduced in the August 15, 1966 issue of Vogue. Photograph by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

388
Figure 3.7
USA. New Haven, Connecticut. 1954. Yale football.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

389
Figure 3.8
USA. New Haven, Connecticut. 1954. Yale football.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

390
Figure 3.9
USA. New Haven, Connecticut. 1954. Yale football.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

391
Figure 3.10
Spread from “A Dangerous Silence,” pages 70-71, in October 31, 1955 issue of Life magazine.
Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

392
Figure 3.11
Spread from “A Dangerous Silence,” pages 72-73, in the October 31, 1955 issue of Life
magazine. Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

393
Figure 3.12
Spread from “A Dangerous Silence,” pages 74-75, in the October 31, 1955 issue of Life
magazine. Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

394
Figure 3.13
France. Paris. 1956. Mme. Fauché, the widow of an impressionist painter.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

395
Figure 3.14
France. Paris. 1956. Mme. Fauché, the widow of an impressionist painter.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

396
Figure 3.15
France. Paris. 1956. Mme. Fauché, the widow of an impressionist painter.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

397
Figure 3.16
“Widow of Montmartre.” Esquire, October 1, 1958. Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum
Photos

398
Figure 3.17
“Widow of Montmartre.” Esquire, October 1, 1958. Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum
Photos

399
Figure 3.18
“Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,” Life, October 21, 1957, 110-111.
Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

400
Figure 3.19
“Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,” Life, October 21, 1957, 112-113.
Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

401
Figure 3.20
“Sound of Girlish Voices Strikes a New Note at Muhlenberg,” Life, October 21, 1957, 114-115.
Photographs by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

402
Figure 3.21
USA. Montgomery, Alabama. 1961. National Guard soldiers escort Freedom Riders along their
ride from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

403
Figure 3.22
“Bruce Davidson”
July 7 - October 2, 1966
Curated by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art

404
Figure 3.23
USA. New York City. 1966. East 100th Street.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

405
Figure 3.24
“East 100th Street: Photographs by Bruce Davidson”
September 22 - November 29, 1970
Curated by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art

406
Figure 3.25
Vogue Magazine 1962. Young Spring Fashion.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

407
Figure 3.26
USA. NYC. 1963. Vogue shoot at Lincoln Center.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

408
Figure 3.27
USA. San Francisco. 1965. Topless restaurant.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

409
Figure 3.28
USA. Palisades, New Jersey. 1958. The Dwarf. Jimmy Armstrong.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

410
Figure 3.29
USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang and the American writer Norman Mailer.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

411
Figure 3.30
USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

412
Figure 3.31
USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

413
Figure 3.32
USA. Brooklyn, NY. 1959. Brooklyn Gang. Bengie inside the candy store.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

414
Figure 3.33
USA. New York City. 1959. Brooklyn Gang. Coney Island. Cathy fixing her hair in a cigarette
machine mirror.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

415
Figure 3.34
A map of New York City in which neighborhoods with high rates of juvenile delinquency are
highlighted. From Emanuel Perlmutter, “Gangs -- What They Are And What To Do About
Them,” New York Times, September 6, 1959, 7.

416
Figure 3.35
A photograph from Emma Harrison, “U. S. To Aid Plan For Youths Here,” New York Times,
December 16, 1959, 46. The caption reads, “James E. McCarthy, director of action phase of new
program to combat juvenile delinquency, indicates area to be covered on Lower East Side. With
him are Raymond Gould, social sciences consultant for the National Institute of Mental Health,
which has granted $412,677 for drive, and Dr. Clara Kaiser, acting dean of New York School of
Social Research, who will head research end of the project.”

417
Figure 3.36
A photograph from “Boy, 16, Is Killed In Gang Ambush At Bronx School,” New York Times,
September 22, 1959, 1. The caption reads, “Scene of Shooting: The entrance to Morris High
School at Boston Road and 166th Street in the Bronx, where John Guzman, 16, was fatally
wounded yesterday.”

418
Figure 3.37
Cars speed over road markings in New York City, 1957.
Ernst Haas -- Getty Images

419
Figure 3.37
Spread from Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal. (1974) At left, “Factory Lunch,”
1973; at right, “August 26, Man-Children,” 1971.
Abigail Heyman

420
Figure 3.38
Untitled, from Travelog (1974)
Charles Harbutt

421
Figure 3.39
A Monimbo woman carrying her dead husband home to be buried in their backyard. Monimbo,
Nicaragua. 1979. From Nicaragua (1981)
Susan Meiselas -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

422
Figure 3.40
Iran. Tabriz. 1980. Demonstration in favor of the leading opposition figure Ayatollah Kazem
Shariatmadari.
Gilles Peress -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

423
Figure 3.41
USA. New York City. 1979.
Gilles Peress -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

424
Figure 3.42
Cover of Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” New York, June 7, 1976.

425
Figure 3.43
“Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960”
July 26 - October 2, 1978
Curated by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art

426
Figure 3.44
USA. New York City. 1966. East 100th Street.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

427
Figure 3.45
Subway Portrait, 1941.
Walker Evans
Museum of Modern Art

428
Figure 3.46
Subway Portrait, 1941.
Walker Evans
Museum of Modern Art

429
Figure 3.47
Subway Portrait, 1941.
Walker Evans
Museum of Modern Art

430
Figure 3.48
USA. New York City. 1957. Lower East Side. Schoolboy and girl with a doll.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

431
Figure 3.49
USA. New York City. Lower East Side. 1990. Rabbi Moishe Singer (L) and his brother, Rabbi
Joseph Singer, overseer of the Mikvah, one of the most honored jobs in the Jewish religion and
one which is handed down from Rabbi to Rabbi.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

432
Figure 3.50
USA. 1965. Isaac Singer, author.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

433
Figure 3.51
Still from the short film “Isaac Singer's Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko's Beard,” (1972) directed by
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos. UCR Arts website:
https://virtualucrarts.ucr.edu/cinema/isaac-singers-nightmare-ms-pupkos-beard.

434
Figure 3.52
“The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973. Photographs and text by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

435
Figure 3.53
“The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973. Photographs and text by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

436
Figure 3.54
“The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973. Photographs and text by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

437
Figure 3.55
“The Cafeteria.” New York magazine, October 15, 1973. Photographs and text by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

438
Figure 3.56
USA. New York City. 1966. Bessie Gakaubowicz, holding a photograph of her and her husband
taken before World War II.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

439
Figure 3.57
USA. New York City. 1973. The Cafeteria.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

440
Figure 3.58
Horse railway, circa 1889. The horse railway, aka horse car, was invented by John Stevenson in
1832. Horses pulled a streetcar riding on metal rails down the street.
New-York Historical Society

441
Figure 3.59
“Beauties of Street Car Travel in New York,” Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, 1871.
Library of Congress

442
Figure 3.60
Proposed elevated railroad terrace for Broadway. Gleason’s Drawing Room Companion, April 1,
1854.
Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

443
Figure 3.61
“Dr. Rufus H. Gilbert’s Covered Atmospheric Railway.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
March 18, 1871.

444
Figure 3.62
“Speer’s Endless Railway Train.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 21, 1874.

445
Figure 3.63
Pedestrians, a trolley car and a horse-drawn carriage traffic appear under the 6th Avenue
elevated train line at Herald Square, New York City. Mounds of snow lie on the street. Winter
1899.
Museum of the City of New York/Byron Collection

446
Figure 3.64
“The Great Subway Contractor -- the Promised Loaf.” 1911.
John Sloan
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia.

447
Figure 3.65
Scene showing the opening of the first subway, New York, October 27, 1904. In attendance and
riding the first train were municipal officials and civic and business leaders. At that time, the
underground extended for 21 miles.
Getty Images

448
Figure 3.66
TAKI 183 graffiti at 183rd and Audubon Avenue in New York, NY, July 19, 1971.
Don Hogan Charles -- New York Times/Redux

449
Figure 3.67
USA. New York City. 1980. Subway.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

450
Figure 3.68
Three photographs by Neal Boenzi illustrating Ralph Blumenthal, “Four Days on Subway -- A
Fresh Look at Lingering Problems,” New York Times, March 1, 1977, 61. The caption reads,
“Outwardly impassive, the subway rider stands resignedly on his noisy, bumpy road home. The
crush of humanity subsides after midnight, when trains are eerily empty.”

451
Figure 3.69
A photograph of a graffiti-covered subway train accompanying Stan Pinkwas, “Uneasy Riders:
Why the MTA Doesn’t Work,” Village Voice, March 17, 1980, 25. Photography by Fred W.
McDarrah.

452
Figure 3.70
A photograph of a sculpture by Michelle Horwitz accompanying Paul L. Montgomery, “Some
Call It ‘The Black Hole Of Calcutta,’” New York Times, November 15, 1970, 8.

453
Figure 3.71
A photograph of a sculpture by Tom Hachtman and Joey Epstein accompanying Ethan C. Eldon,
“Our Subways: Worthy of a Second Dante,” New York Times, July 2, 1976, 27.

454
Figure 3.72
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

455
Figure 3.73
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

456
Figure 3.74
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

457
Figure 3.75
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

458
Figure 3.76
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

459
Figure 3.77
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

460
Figure 3.78
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

461
Figure 3.79
Scene from Moulin Rouge, 1952, directed by John Huston with Eliot Elisofon as color
consultant.
Everett Collection

462
Figure 3.80
“Razzle-dazzle Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec.” Life January 19, 1953. Pages 64-65. Photographs by
Eliot Elisofon.

463
Figure 3.81
“Seven Stars in Seven Colors.” Life June 29, 1953. Photographs by Eliot Elisofon.

464
Figure 3.82
“Seven Stars in Seven Colors.” Life June 29, 1953. Photographs by Eliot Elisofon.

465
Figure 3.83
USA. New York City. 1980. Subway.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

466
Figure 3.84
USA. NYC. 1957. Lower East Side.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

467
Figure 3.85
France. Paris. 1948. Model wearing Dior on the banks of the Seine.
Robert Capa -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

468
Figure 3.86
“How to Swim Now -- 4 Easy Ways.” Vogue, September 1, 1962, 150-151. Photograph by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

469
Figure 3.87
Cover of Vogue, February 15, 1961. Photography by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

470
Figure 3.88
Vogue fashion shoot, New York City. 1960. Exact date unknown. Photograph by Bruce
Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

471
Figure 3.89
“What your clothes owe you…and where you may be shortchanging your clothes.” Vogue April
1, 1961. 108. Photography by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

472
Figure 3.90
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

473
Figure 3.91
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

474
Figure 3.92
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

475
Figure 3.93
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

476
Figure 3.94
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

477
Figure 3.95
USA. New York City. 1975. Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

478
Figure 3.96
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

479
Figure 3.97
A SS trooper acts as auxiliary policeman on patrol with a regular policeman in Berlin, Germany
in March 1933.
INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo

480
Figure 3.98
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

481
Figure 3.99
Tereska, a child in a residence for disturbed children in Poland. She drew a picture of “home” on
the blackboard. 1948.
David Seymour -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

482
Figure 3.100
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

483
Figure 3.101
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

484
Figure 3.102
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

485
Figure 3.103
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

486
Figure 3.104
The Promise, 1949
Barnett Newman
Whitney Museum of American Art

487
Figure 3.105
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

488
Figure 3.106
Pages 94-95 from Ger-hard Schoenberner, The Yel-low Star: The Per-se-cu-tion of the Jews in
Europe 1933 – 1945. New York: Bantam Books, 1979. Originally published in German as Der
Gelbe Stern (1960)
The left-hand image is a still taken from a short film made by an unnamed German soldier
present at the July 1941 pogrom in Lviv. The author of the book credits Glavnoye Arkivnoye
Upravleniye, Moscow’s main directorate of foreign military intelligence, for the image.

489
Figure 3.107
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

490
Figure 3.108
USA. New York City. 1980. Subway.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

491
Figure 3.109
(Untitled), 1980.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

492
Figure 3.110
Cover of New York magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring Michael Daly’s story “Hunting the
Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos.

493
Figure 3.111
(Untitled), 1985.
Bruce Davidson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com.

494
Figure 3.112
A costumed decoy police officer appears in New York magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring
Michael Daly’s story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum
Photos.

495
Figure 3.113
A costumed decoy police officer appears in New York magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring
Michael Daly’s story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum
Photos.

496
Figure 3.114
A costumed decoy police officer appears in New York magazine’s June 3, 1985 issue featuring
Michael Daly’s story “Hunting the Wolf Packs.” Photograph by Bruce Davidson -- Magnum
Photos.

497
Chapter 3 - Alvin Baltrop’s Waterfront Opacities
Figure 4.1
The back of Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag, repurposed from a military-issued shoulder bag, on
which Baltrop inscribed a poem and a drawing of New York City’s West Side Highway.
Bronx Museum of Art

498
Figure 4.2
The side of Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag, repurposed from a military-issued shoulder bag, on
which Baltrop inscribed a poem and a drawing of New York City’s West Side Highway.
Bronx Museum of Art

499
Figure 4.3
The very first container is loaded aboard the Ideal X at Port Newark, New Jersey, on April 26,
1956. The ship is dressed with a string of international maritime signal flags as a sign of
celebration of the occasion.
Journal of Commerce

500
Figure 4.4
An aerial view of the Ideal X carrying fifty-eight containers from Port Newark, New Jersey, to
the Port of Houston, Texas.
Journal of Commerce

501
Figure 4.5
A truck and car fell onto West Street as a section of the West Side Highway gave way near Little
West 12th Street. December 16, 1973.
Ted Cowell -- New York Times

502
Figure 4.6
Untitled, 1967
Acrylic sheet and galvanized iron
6 1/8 × 27 × 24 inches (15.6 × 68.6 × 60.9 cm)
Donald Judd
Walker Art Center

503
Figure 4.7
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

504
Figure 4.8
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

505
Figure 4.9
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

506
Figure 4.10
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

507
Figure 4.11
Left to right: James, Alvin, and Dorothy Mae Baltrop, mid-1950s, The Bronx, NY.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

508
Figure 4.12
“Untitled (The Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park, New York City),” 1965.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

509
Figure 4.13
“Dionysus in 69” (1968) at the Performing Garage, designed by Jerry Rojo. Pentheus (Richard
Dia) pointing to Dionysus (William Finley) in the midst of the spectators.
Photo: Frederick Eberstadt, courtesy: Richard Schechner.

510
Figure 4.14
Dionysus in 69
Director: Richard Schechner Production: The Performance Group
New York, 1969
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972),
118-119.

511
Figure 4.15
Marat/Sade
Director: Peter Brook
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 28-
29.

512
Figure 4.16
Marat/Sade
Director: Peter Brook
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 30-
31.

513
Figure 4.17
Marat/Sade
Director: Peter Brook
Spread from Max Waldman, Waldman on Theater (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 34-
35.

514
Figure 4.18
Yukio Mishima poses as St. Sebastian, inspired by Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian (ca. 1616), now
in the Palazzo Rosso of Genoa. This photograph was published in the first issue of the literary
magazine Chi to bara (Blood and roses) (1966).
Shinoyama Kishin/Tensei

515
Figure 4.19
[Author Yukio Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian]
From Ba-Ra-Kei Ordeal by Roses: Photographs of Yukio Mishima by Eikoh Hosoe. New York:
Aperture, 1985.
Eikoh Hosoe

516
Figure 4.20
“John Lennon & Yoko Ono,” from Double Fantasy, Cologne: Taschen, 2015.
Kishin Shinoyama

517
Figure 4.21
Bathing in the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome, 1957.
Ken Domon Museum of Photography

518
Figure 4.22
Untitled, from Man and Woman. 1961
Eikoh Hosoe

519
Figure 4.23
Untitled, from Man and Woman. 1961
Eikoh Hosoe

520
Figure 4.24
Three Navy Sailors, n.d (1969-1972)
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

521
Figure 4.25
Navy Ship, n.d (1969-1972).
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

522
Figure 4.26
Alvin Baltrop’s New York City taxicab driver’s license, 1975.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

523
Figure 4.27
Alvin Baltrop and his girlfriend Alice [last name unknown], undated.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

524
Figure 4.28
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

525
Figure 4.29
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

526
Figure 4.30
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

527
Figure 4.31
A military parade in Cairo, Egypt in 1970.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

528
Figure 4.32
Factory workers and students visit the Great Wall of China on their day off. From “Red China --
Spruced up for Show,” Life, July 17, 1964, 102.
René Burri -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

529
Figure 4.33
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

530
Figure 4.34
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

531
Figure 4.35
Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat Part II, 1973.
Everett Collection

532
Figure 4.36
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

533
Figure 4.37
Leonard Fink
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center.

534
Figure 4.38
Leonard Fink
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

535
Figure 4.39
Leonard Fink
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

536
Figure 4.40
Leonard Fink
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

537
Figure 4.41
Leonard Fink
[Untitled], no date.
Archives of The Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

538
Figure 4.42
Bull’s Eye, 1970
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

539
Figure 4.43
“Ron O’Brien,” Art and Physique, 1956. Courtesy Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender
Historical Society of Northern California, San Francisco.
From Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality In TwentiethCentury American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 173.

540
Figure 4.44
A prisoner's cell inside cell block 7 of Rikers Island in New York City on December 20, 1974.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

541
Figure 4.45
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

542
Figure 4.46
Photograph of assassinated mafia boss Paul Castellano taken by Ruby Washington, in Selwyn
Raab, “Authorities Foresee Power Struggle,” New York Times, December 17, 1985, B4.

543
Figure 4.47
The uncropped version of the New York Times photograph of Paul Castellano, taken on
December 16, 1985 and published the following day.
Ruby Washington -- New York Times

544
Figure 4.48
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

545
Figure 4.49
(Untitled), 1975-1986.
Alvin Baltrop Trust. © 2010, Third Streaming, NY; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New
York. All rights reserved.

546
Figure 4.50
Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976
Peter Hujar
Copyright 2024 The Peter Hujar Archive

547
Figure 4.51
Man in Polyester Suit, negative 1980; print 1981
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

548
Figure 4.52
Calla Lily, 1984
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

549
Figure 4.53
Ken Moody, 1984
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

550
Figure 4.54
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, 1984
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

551
Figure 4.55
Hammerhead crane unloading forty-foot containers from Asian ports. American President Lines
terminal, Los Angeles harbor, San Pedro, California, November 1992. From Fish Story,
Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995.
Allan Sekula

552
Figure 4.56
Man salvaging bricks from a demolished waterfront warehouse. Rijnhaven. Rotterdam. The
Netherlands. September 1992. From Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995.
Allan Sekula

553
Figure 4.57
Dockers unloading a shipload of frozen fish from Argentina. From Fish Story, Düsseldorf:
Richter, 1995.
Allan Sekula

554
Figure 4.57
A S&M bar scene in William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising.
United Artists/Everett Collection

555
Figure 4.58
The interior of the men’s room in Mansfield’s Central Park, as printed in the FBI Enforcement
Bulletin, June 1963. The storage closet with the towel dispenser is visible in the back.
United States Department of Justice.

556
Figure 4.59
Lieutenant Bill Spognardi manning a hidden camera in the Central Park men’s room, as printed
in the FBI Enforcement Bulletin, June 1963.
United States Department of Justice.

557
Figure 4.60
Still from surveillance film made by the Mansfield, Ohio police department in 1962 of gay sex in
a public bathroom.
William E. Jones

558
Figure 4.61
Still from surveillance film made by the Mansfield, Ohio police department in 1962 of gay sex in
a public bathroom.
William E. Jones

559
Figure 4.62
Barbara Faggins, “Teddy’s Transexual Passenger Talks!” Jet May 31, 1982, 60-61.

560
Figure 4.63
The front side of Alvin Baltrop’s camera bag, repurposed from a military-issued shoulder bag, on
which Baltrop drew a yin-yang symbol, swastikas, and other symbols.
Bronx Museum of Art

561
Figure 4.64
Untitled (reclining woman), 1956/57
Seydou Keïta
Courtesy CAAC—The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva © Seydou Keïta/IPM.

562
Figure 4.65
Untitled (Burning Pots), ca. 1919, watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper.
Awa Tsireh
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe

563
Figure 4.66
Untitled (Buffalo Dance) ca. 1918, watercolor on paper.
Awa Tsireh
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe

564
Figure 4.67
Flyer for Alvin Baltrop’s 1977 photography exhibition at The Glines, a gay non-profit arts center
at 260 West Broadway, Manhattan.

565
Chapter 4 - Tod Papageorge’s Woven Creations
Figure 5.1
“Madrid, Spain 1933”
Henri Cartier-Bresson -- Magnum Photos
Digital file found in Magnum’s online archive: pro.magnumphotos.com

566
Figure 5.2
Pike County Court House, Pittsfield, Illinois, 1894-1895. Architect: Henry Elliott. Reproduction
number: LC-S35-TP8-2
Tod Papageorge -- Seagram County Court House Archives / Library of Congress

567
Figure 5.3
Installation view of the exhibition “Public Relations: Garry Winogrand.” October 18, 1977–
December 11, 1977.
Kate Keller -- Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

568
Figure 5.4
Cover of Garry Winogrand’s book Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and
Rodeo, Austin: University of Texas, 1980.

569
Figure 5.5
“A Story in the Sun,” Pageant, August 1955. Photographs by Garry Winogrand.

570
Figure 5.6
“A Night at the Opera,” Infinity, November 1952. Photographs by Garry Winogrand.
George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

571
Figure 5.7
Minsky's Burlesque, New Jersey, c. 1954
Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery

572
Figure 5.8
Advertisement for 100 Pipers Scotch, 1966.
Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery

573
Figure 5.9
New York, ca. 1960
Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery

574
Figure 5.10
“Five Unrelated Photographers,” Museum of Modern Art. May 28 - July 21, 1963.
Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

575
Figure 5.11
Installation view of the exhibition “The Photographer's Eye,” in the series, “Art in a Changing
World: 1884-1964.” May 27, 1964–August 23, 1964.
Rolf Petersen -- Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

576
Figure 5.12
“From the Picture Press” exhibition. January 30, 1973–April 29, 1973.
Kate Keller -- Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

577
Figure 5.13
Phan Thi Kim Phuc (center) flees with other children after South Vietnamese planes mistakenly
dropped napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians.
Nick Ut -- AP

578
Figure 5.14
Phan Thi Kim Phuc lies in bed as she undergoes laser treatments on the scars left from napalm
burns, performed by Jill S. Waibel MD at the Miami Dermatology and Laser Institute on June
28, 2022 in Miami, Florida. Waibel says the treatments will smooth and soften the pale, thick
scar tissue that ripples from her left hand up her arm, up her neck to her hairline and down
almost all of her back but more importantly will relieve the deep aches and pains that plague her
to this day.
Nick Ut -- Getty Images

579
Figure 5.15
Indian Point Nuclear Station on March 3, 1985 in Buchanan, New York.
Santi Visalli -- Getty Images

580
Figure 5.16
The twin towers of the World Trade Center on the first morning of the power blackout of July
1977 in New York City.
Allan Tannenbaum -- Getty Images

581
Figure 5.17
Cover of New York Daily News, July 15, 1977 showing the Statue of Liberty still alight during
the blackout.

582
Figure 5.18
Cover of New York Daily News, July 15, 1977 depicting a massive fire in Brooklyn.

583
Figure 5.19
Looters and residents of the Bushwick neighborhood run down Broadway during the blackout in
New York on July 14, 1977.
Tyrone Dukes -- New York Times/Redux

584
Figure 5.20
“Black Night of Our Soul,” New York Daily News, July 15, 1977.

585
Figure 5.21
“Heart of Darkness,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977.

586
Figure 5.22
“Blackout ‘77, Once More With Looting,” Time, July 25, 1977.

587
Figure 5.23
On May 6, 1992, two people walk past a burned-out building on Broadway and Gates Avenue in
Bushwick, Brooklyn, left over from looting after the blackout in 1977. There was no sign of
rebirth in the devastated storefronts along Broadway.
Edward Keating -- New York Times/Redux

588
Figure 5.24
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

589
Figure 5.25
Shea Stadium, New York, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

590
Figure 5.26
Cotton Bowl (Notre Dame vs. Texas), Cotton Bowl Stadium, Dallas, January 1, 1971.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

591
Figure 5.27
Little League World Series, Lamade Stadium, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, August 26, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

592
Figure 5.28
Newspapers, Cincinnati, October 10, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

593
Figure 5.29
Movie theater, Columbus, Ohio November 20, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

594
Figure 5.30
“Is It True About Your Keeping Political Prisoners Caged Up?”
Washington Post, July 8, 1970.
Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (007.18.00)
LC-DIG-hlb-07555 A 1970 Herblock Cartoon, © The Herb Block Foundation

595
Figure 5.31
College football game (Michigan vs. Ohio State), Ohio Stadium, Columbus, November 21, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

596
Figure 5.32
Race day, Indianapolis 500, May 30, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

597
Figure 5.33
Preakness Stakes, Pimlico racetrack, Baltimore, May 16, 1970.
From American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, New York: Aperture, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

598
Figure 5.34
Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

599
Figure 5.35
Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

600
Figure 5.36
Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

601
Figure 5.37
Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

602
Figure 5.38
Untitled, from Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007.
Tod Papageorge

603
Figure 5.39
B1, May 6, 1980 issue of the New York Times, a copy of which is visible in Tod Papageorge’s
photograph of three women on a bench in Central Park, found in his book Passing Through
Eden.

604
Figure 5.40
Plate 41, showing profile headshots made with Alphonse Bertillon’s criminal portraiture system.
From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification Anthropométrique, Paris: Ollier-Henry, 1893.

605
Figure 5.41
Illustrations showing some of the bodily measurements in Bertillon’s system.
From Alphonse Bertillon, Identification Anthropométrique, Paris: Ollier-Henry, 1893.

606
Figure 5.42
“New York, 1967”
Tod Papageorge -- Danziger Gallery

607
Figure 5.43
Central Park Zoo, New York, 1967
Gary Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery

608
Figure 5.44
CBS Radio Playhouse Number 4. Originally known as the Gallo Opera House at 254 West 54th
Street, New York, NY. April 13, 1944.
CBS via Getty Images

609
Figure 5.45
“Atlantic Expanding, Expedites Campaign,” Billboard, December 23, 1978: 90. Steve Rubell
and Bianca Jagger at Studio 54.
Sonia Moskowitz

610
Figure 5.46
Crowds gather outside Studio 54, hoping to gain admission. 1978.
John Barrett -- PHOTOlink/Alamy

611
Figure 5.47
Studio 54 doorman Marc Benecke, shown on July 27, 1979, selects who will enter the nightclub.
Allan Tannenbaum -- Getty Images

612
Figure 5.48
Studio 54’s entry hallway. 1977.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy

613
Figure 5.49
Studio 54’s main bar. 1977.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy

614
Figure 5.50
Studio 54's banquettes, as seen from the bar. Date unknown.
Jaime Ardiles-Arce

615
Figure 5.51
Studio 54’s dancefloor with kinetic lighting. 1978.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink.net/MediaPunch/Alamy

616
Figure 5.52
Carmen D'Alessio, who led the design of Studio 54, appears in New York in 1981.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy

617
Figure 5.53
From left, Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields, and Steve Rubell appear at Studio 54 in
1981.
Adam Scull -- PHOTOlink/MediaPunch/Alamy

618
Figure 5.54
The entryway of Studio 54 is decorated with faux trees draped in Spanish moss. Date unknown.
John Kelly -- Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images

619
Figure 5.55
Behind the bar during a party to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Studio 54, with special
decorations from fashion designer Issey Miyake (apple blossom-like plants and gold screens)
along with a combination entertainment/fashion show with an “East Meets West” theme on April
26, 1978.
Fairchild Archive/Penske Media via Getty Images

620
Figure 5.56
A model of the Titanic appears above the stage with clubbers dancing below, at Studio 54. Date
unknown.
John Kelly -- Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images

621
Figure 5.57
Grace Jones performs on New Year’s Eve 1977 at Studio 54 in New York City.
Sonia Moskowitz -- Getty Images

622
Figure 5.58
The photographer Brassaï at his desk in front of his typewriter in his Paris apartment on April 20,
1970.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

623
Figure 5.59
L'Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, 1939
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery

624
Figure 5.60
Streetwalker near the Place d'Italie, c.1931.
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery

625
Figure 5.61
Female Couple, 1932
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery

626
Figure 5.62
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

627
Figure 5.63
Group in a Dance Hall, 1932
Brassaï -- Huxley-Parlour Gallery

628
Figure 5.64
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

629
Figure 5.65
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

630
Figure 5.66
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

631
Figure 5.67
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

632
Figure 5.68
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

633
Figure 5.69
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

634
Figure 5.70
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

635
Figure 5.71
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

636
Figure 5.72
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

637
Figure 5.73
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

638
Figure 5.74
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

639
Figure 5.75
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

640
Figure 5.76
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

641
Figure 5.77
Detail from Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

642
Figure 5.78
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
Tod Papageorge

643
Figure 5.79
Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda on a night out in New York City, circa 1969.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

644
Figure 5.80
Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger attend the party for Reid Rogers on September 19, 1984 at Limelight
in New York City.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

645
Figure 5.81
Socialite Bianca Jagger, fashion designer Halston, producer Jack Haley, Jr. and actress/singer
Liza Minnelli attend Studio 54's New Year's Eve Party on December 31, 1977 at Studio 54 in
New York City.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

646
Figure 5.82
Socialite Bianca Jagger, fashion designer Halston, producer Jack Haley, Jr. and actress/singer
Liza Minnelli attend Studio 54's New Year's Eve Party on December 31, 1977 at Studio 54 in
New York City.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

647
Figure 5.83
Untitled, 1978-1980, from Studio 54, London: Stanley/Barker, 2014.
[The author circled Brooke Shields in red.]
Tod Papageorge

648
Figure 5.84
“Off the Screen,” People, May 29, 1978.

649
Figure 5.85
1966 Ivory soap advertisement, featuring Brooke Shields at right.
Francesco Scavullo

650
Figure 5.86
Advertisement for news segment titled “World’s Youngest Sex Symbol?” using a cropped
version of a 1975 photograph of Brooke Shields by Francesco Scavullo
NBC News 4

651
Conclusion
Figure 6.1
A sequence of photographs of the March 7, 1970 eclipse on the front page of the March 8, 1970
issue of the New York Times.

652
Figure 6.2
New Yorkers view the April 7, 1970 eclipse through peepholes made in cardboard boxes worn
over the head.
Mel Finkelstein -- New York Daily News

653
Figure 6.3
A young boy holds up a piece of exposed photographic film he will use to safely view the total
solar eclipse as he flies to Nantucket, MA on March 7, 1970.
Charles Dixon -- Boston Globe via Getty Images

654
Figure 6.4
A man uses a telescope to project an image of the total solar eclipse onto a small screen in
Nantucket, MA on March 7, 1970.
Charles Dixon -- Boston Globe via Getty Images

655
Figure 6.5
David Hammons’ “Day's End,” at Hudson River Park in New York, May 13, 2021.
Simbarashe Cha -- New York Times / Redux

656
Figure 6.6
David Hammons’s initial sketch for “Day’s End,” sent to Adam D. Weinberg, the director of the
Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2014. The sculpture was completed in 2021.
David Hammons

657
Figure 6.7
The ground glass on the rear side of a 4x5” camera has a grid faintly etched into it to help the
photographer precisely organize the visual elements of a photograph.
Alex Burke

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation considers a period of New York City’s history, 1965 to 1985, which witnessed innumerable, sometimes catastrophic electrical failures, ruptures in the infrastructures of transportation, and entertainment, as well as a historic decline in the standard of living, all set against a crisis of faith in visual and textual journalism which remains with us to this day. The four photographers discussed, René Burri, Bruce Davidson, Alvin Baltrop, and Tod Papageorge imaged these fissures and in doing so revealed fissures within their own medium. Operating in a grey zone between positivist certainty and postmodernist doubt, these photographers made incomplete, questionable, and evasive records of their city.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses