Realism in the Shadows

John Haber
in New York City

Brian Griffin and Bruce Davidson

There is socialist realism, the kind with workers up on a pedestal, and then there is "Capitalist Realism." Do not ask which is more chilling.

For Brian Griffin, Margaret Thatcher's England was already chilling enough, but its shadows take on a life of their own. They linger on in his photographs, like Thatcherism, as a reminder of what her promises mean for those forced to live with them today. Unlike his images, it is not pretty. But they are, as well as a direct descendent of Surrealism, and they should have one asking about the very bounds of realism and photojournalism. But then Bruce Davidson already had an answer. He trained his eye on New York, with his politics implicit in its people.

Davidson called his photographs of the civil-rights movement "Time of Change." It was a rare departure from the matter-of-fact tone of such series as "Brooklyn Gang," "East 100th Street," "Subway," "Central Park," and "New York Harbor"—from a photographer who, at age eighty-seven, still sticks to the facts. He has no need for heroes, because everyone to him is a hero. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., at the podium stands off to the right, because the greatest leader speaks for those who follow him. Davidson has no room for villains either, not even the street gang. The title could, though, stand for his entire show at the Queens Museum, spanning forty years of a changing country and, most of all, an ever-changing New York City.

Get real

Under Stalin, Soviet photography had to choose between propaganda and experiment, and the choice could be a matter of life and death. For Brian Griffin, the choice no longer exists. The market has its dogma, and the results are surreal. Griffin shares a gallery with Meryl Meisler and, in one of her photos, "A Scholarly View of the Jewish Mother." Meisler presents the entirety of Long Island as one big dysfunctional family. This being the 1970s, for a gay woman about to come out of the closet and depart for Manhattan, it also like entering a very campy theater already in progress.

Griffin looks instead to modern photography as both propaganda and experiment—both well apart from the choice between formalism and everyday life. He has the startling angles of Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, along with their raking, glowering shadows and light. Sliced bread rises up and flops down across a man's bare back like steel teeth. He has the poses of official sculpture, in at least one case on a pedestal. Most of all, he has the unsettling narrative impulse of Surrealism. Men in office doors could come right out of subway phone booths in a nightmarish painting by George Tooker.

This is political photography—and that means both serious distrust of the reigning ideology and an obvious message of its own. "Capitalist realism," Griffin's coinage, has a double irony. It says that the right's answer to Communism is just as oppressive, and its answer to a worker's utopia is just as unreal. In their different ways, socialist realism and free markets promise liberation, which never comes. That man on a pedestal is not bronze but a human being, only burdened by the same gestures and the same harsh tasks ahead. Fortunately, though, the sixty photographs, from the mid-1970s to 1990, do not only take sides.

"All right we are two nations," John Dos Passos wrote during the Depression—a formulation still alive for America's left in "the 1 percent." Griffin's work, too, divides roughly in two, between workers and management, but neither is exactly triumphant. Another laborer hammers futilely at the ice-covered Alps. Others lie on their backs, crushed beneath the pipes they meant to forge and the tools they hoped to wield. They cannot, though, resist giving the item on top a kiss. Maybe capitalism is not torture, but sadomasochism.

The men in suits, too, are more comic than sinister, not to mention slimmer and more stylish than bowler hats for René Magritte. One stares at an industrial eyesore as if on a visionary landscape, while another seems unlikely to make it out of bed. Two share a horse, like Lady Godiva dressed in gray. As in The Waste Land, a crowd flows over London Bridge, but death has not undone so many. They pass the dark confines of perhaps a limo toward a gleaming modern city, as if trapped between their overseers and their work, but with the edge on both. The bridge rails have their parallel in bright vertical bars in the foreground that may serve as a vision or a prison, too.

Griffin works almost exclusively in black and white, with lights suffusing the shadows and shadows entering the light. A man seen through a cracked window gestures like a police officer making an arrest, but the cracks hold the light. Another suited man holds a letter that appears to dissolve as in a flame. A worker looks up past wreckage to what might be fireworks in the night. A show like this can become as oppressive as its subject matter, whether in its comedy or in its anger. Both, though, get to share in the light.

A changing city

Photojournalism does not often head for Central Park, but Bruce Davidson did, in 1995—well after Henri Cartier-Bresson invited him to join Magnum Photos, photojournalists in a quest to cover the world. The park, you might think, is for selfies, not to mention white joggers and tourists. His park, though, is for everyone, including a white woman by the lake in a black man's arms. It has a wedding party and playgrounds, but one can hardly tell the homeless smiling for the camera from anyone else out for a summer's day. It has its bird watchers, of course, and Davidson found them so fascinating that he became one, too. No wonder he earned everyone's trust.

He sees the news as first and foremost a human story, because people for him are necessarily newsmakers. In what could be his most memorable image, two blacks and three whites share the back seat of a bus, if sharing is the right word. The males do share crossed arms and distrustful eyes. The women take their arms or lean away, half asleep, while a boy, fully asleep, buries his head in the young white woman's shoulder. Twin rear windows, drenched in sunlight, never quite separate them or pull them together. The windows do, though, link them all to a vibrant city with room for both black and white.

That said, Davidson pulls off a memorable career largely without memorable images. The couple by the lake is one—and so is the wedding party in the conservatory garden, where a little black girl peels off from her elders in matching pink dresses. So is the sea of faces among freedom marchers seen from above in 1965. Yet he values more the sea. Another overhead shot captures rush hour in the old Penn Station in 1963, the year of its demolition, while elsewhere a mother and child stand awesomely alone. More than famous photos of the station's great arches, trellises, and glass ceilings, he brings home what New York lost to a time of change.

First, though, he had to earn that trust. The curator, Benjamin Mendez, speaks of his portraits as "rooted in trust and mutual understanding." He began in 1959 with the street gang, not as criminals but rather as kids at play. At most, he works with them on their pose, rather than staging them or sneaking up on them. Maybe he identified with them, as barely ten years older, in his twenties. By the end, surely they identified with him as well, and one of them is riding home on that bus.

Davidson calls himself an "outsider on the inside," and he needed that trust, because he glorifies no one. These are all just ordinary people, but also strange people in a strange time, like a clown taking a cigarette break, his black suit hanging loose and his ghastly makeup smeared. Like Orthodox Jews and Hispanics on the Lower East Side, they are used to journalism looking for answers. He allows them cheery expressions at the cost, no doubt, of the objectivity of Robert Frank and The Americans—or the brutal idiosyncrasy of Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. He refuses Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," because how can there be a lone decisive moment in ever so many years of change?

Naturally he thinks in series, but the Queens Museum goes further, to think first of a style. A series can return on a far wall, and chronology goes out the window. You will just have to take for granted that Davidson found himself early, although he turned to color and a larger format for the subways in 1980, in what he called his "tunnel vision." You will have to live without his occasional foray further afield, to Paris or Arizona. Still, he has the last word with Central Park back in the news this past summer, as a white woman called the cops (twice!) on a black man who had the audacity to ask her to keep her dog on a leash—and to offer the dog a treat. The man was there as a dedicated bird watcher.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Brian Griffin and Meryl Meisler ran at Steven Kasher through April 9, 2016, Bruce Davidson at the Queens Museum through January 17, 2021. The review of Griffin first appeared in slightly different form in New York Photo Review.