Turning to America

John Haber
in New York City

Photography: But Still, It Turns and Dawoud Bey

RaMell Ross photographed a fallen steeple in Alabama, with no church in sight. Somehow, though, it landed intact, and the photo's uncanny clarity only heightens the appeal of its clean wood, tart yellow, and worldly geometry, much as a long exposure lends asphalt a radiant purple.

There is no room for idols in South County, not even fallen ones, and plenty of ground for distrust. Life here goes on all the same, along with its rituals, and its African American community can still sustain a wary dignity. In the words of the show's title, "But Still, It Turns." The International Center of Photography brings together Ross and others who cross America collectively and, often as not, individually. It is a collective portrait of America as well, through people rooted in the landscape. As a postscript, after forty years Dawoud Bey was back in Harlem, and it was like he never left.

Bey was barely in his twenties when he took his camera to the streets. He was a kid from Queens, but with family uptown and a sense of his heritage. Go ahead and call the photos street life, but they evoke a community. Could he still find it there today? More than you might think, when he can claim everything he sees as an African American's own. His photos, in turn, offer a glimpse of hope in a divided nation, as "An American Project" at the Whitney Museum.

Danger, distrust, and celebration

"But Still, It Turns" is filled with signs of danger and distrust. It is a celebration all the same, on the first anniversary of ICP's new home on the Lower East Side. It is even something of a relief, after months on lockdown followed by exhibitions of the community's response to Covid-19. It is also far less of a grab bag than it sounds from its subtitle, "Recent Photography from the World," no more than the global photography in "The New Woman" at the Met. Just seven photographers and one team of two fill both display floors, without leaving the United States and with ample room for each. What, then, is it about, and how is it turning?

Galileo is supposed to have uttered the title's words quietly, to himself, when forced to recant his belief that the earth orbits the sun. And the curator, Paul Graham, has global or even cosmic aspirations. Wall text quotes a poem by Robert Penn Warren, asking big things: "Tell me a story of deep delight." The show has its delights, for sure, and it really is telling stories. Yet they are hardly joyful and hard indeed to spell out.

A little girl for RaMell Ross plays behind a rose bush, as if in hiding. Black fathers and sons at play could be on the brink of violence, while another girl rides a strangely empty bus. Only her eyes emerge above the seat in front of her, as if watching for danger from you. Stairs lead into depth and into the snow, mixing delight with the dark promise of the unknown. The show also screens his documentary, Hale County: This Morning, This Evening, punctuated by a black girl on life support and a burial. And then nature tries to recover the land for itself, as soft yellow seedlings scatter in the wind.

Others have their own treachery and delights, like Kristine Potter in Colorado. Her dappled summer light on a creek bed could pass for cold winter snow. Life intrudes, but also death, with a field of bones and the decaying carcass of a fox. Still, their bare white is a thing of beauty, too. A man on his back, taking in the sun on a rock, is surrounded by water, but Drying Out. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa could be speaking for them all when he calls his contribution All My Gone Life.

Wolukau-Wanambwa has a wall, floor to ceiling, of photos large and small. They are archival and his own, and there is no telling whose stories are whose and who now is gone. They include cryptic graffiti and a blurred but still ominous chain-link fence. A discarded Muppet leans against a fence with its wide eyes and mouth more expressive than ever, assuming they have anything left to express. Two-channel videos by Richard Choi show people holding onto their own, but barely, like an elderly man winding a gorgeous old clock and a younger man with his cat. They are, as Choi's title has it, What Remains.

Their tone is elegiac, like the show as a whole. Another man eats dinner off the tray from a cafeteria or nursing home, while the work's title tells of his treasured baseball glove. Opening wall text, to its credit, speaks of their stories as anything but a straight line. The thick spreading branches of a tree for Vanessa Winship have a near human life of their own. Everything, the text adds, is seen through the "prism of time"—not a bad metaphor for photographs, since prisms refract light. Choi's two channels for a single subject never quite match up, for they are refracting time as well.

Crossings, old and new

The sun may not orbit the earth, but photography is crossing the nation in search of its people. Winship comes all the way from England, Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti from Italy. Curran Hatleberg, who appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, heads west for the Northern Pacific and what he calls its Lost Coast, while Choi, born in LA, lives just north of New York City. Gregory Halpern has his own Californian journey, from upstate New York to a place known only as ZZYZX, and Potter came to Colorado's harsh terrain from Dallas. They have a keen sense of place, through what another show has called "Immersion," but you and they may still feel more than a little lost. Ross in Alabama is a stay-at-home by comparison.

For them all, crossing the country means crossing political borders as well—especially America's abiding division by race. Casotti and Brutti find not open highways but a single division, a street in Saint Louis. Whites live on one side with better homes and the ugly convenience of fast food, blacks to the other with auto repair shops and worse. The yellow stripe down its center, in a photo's foreground, becomes a barrier to the viewer as well. Facing walls at ICP have the view across to either side, while pedestals between them alternate portraits of African Americans with bare rooms. They look lost in the intersection and the open space of the gallery.

Other crossings are reaching out. Wolukau-Wanambwa, a black photographer who teaches at RISD, has written for publications by both Graham and Winship. She, in turn, captures a bridge in Chicago and both blacks and whites. Their standing portraits are casual to the point of selfies, but with here and there a sign of affection. A black man dresses in black and his son in white, both in their Sunday best, and the boy reaches all but unconsciously for his father's ear. When Ross shoots three black men on playground swings from the rear, they may pose a threat or an invitation to play.

Graham sees the show as an act of recovery for both photography and America. A photographer himself, he spoke to The New York Times of putting documentary photography on display, for all its neglect as an art form. Then again, as with his talk of stories and astronomy, he may have an axe to grind. Not so very long ago, ICP exhibited photojournalism as its "Magnum Manifesto," while high-end galleries keep returning to Civil Rights marches with Gordon Parks. Then, too, a road trip is crossing old territory, after Robert Frank and The Americans or Lee Friedlander in his Western Landscape and "America by Car." Just in case you forgot, a mezzanine display case has other examples as well.

"But Still, It Turns" is not creating but correcting the record. Here there are no purple mountains and skyscrapers, no suburban homes and bus depots at dawn, but only people that others have chosen to forget. Ross calls a series Famous Men—after Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book by James Agee and Walker Evans about migrant farmers in the Depression. Halpern photographs a black woman in white fur and a black man, naked from the waist up with a stone in one eye, like a savage force of nature. A city in Southern California, its lights set against a towering night sky, could be on fire. Potter calls her rocky portrait of the West her Manifest, an allusion to white America's "manifest destiny."

Then, too, this is hardly photojournalism. ICP says as much when it cites as influences not just Frank and Evans, but Diane Arbus as well. Above all, it is about American people and places—and how each shapes the other. Hatleberg's lost coast includes gatherings of family, friends, and their dogs that never quite come together. A boy for Ross squeezes himself below a car and above its wheel, in that discomforting space between them and between art and photography. Even politics lies just below the surface, like those stories of delight.

Speaking for themselves

Dawoud Bey opens his retrospective opens with selections from "Harlem Redux," from 2014 to 2017, with hardly an African American in sight. Construction sites and tourists create an obstacle course and attest to a neighborhood in transit. So does graffiti on the clouded window of a chain store—and that was before Covid New York left everything in flux. So does a white man in what must be his shop. Look again, though, and two young blacks stand undisturbed behind him, pitching in. Like the window, this is a layered history, and it cannot bury past layers once and for all.

Bey made his name with "Harlem, U.S.A." in 1975, and already, as in the series title, he places black America at the heart of a thoroughly American project—right up there, he must have hoped, with Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank. You may remember idle street life, like a boy leaning on a sawhorse outside a movie theater. The boy, though, concedes nothing, no more than an older man in a top hat and white tie. Bey cites Roy DeCavara as an influence, but his Harlem is less the jazz scene than a place for everyday dignity. Before long he is upstate, on the first of several residencies and commissions, and the refusal of stereotypes only deepens. He pictures a marching band, boys dressed for church, and a mother holding her infant child.

He already makes more of an effort to compose his photos, cropping people off at the edge. He experiments with large-scale Polaroids in 1991 and with color, spreading subjects across several prints in 1991. Still, he is not at heart a stylist, no more than a photojournalist or psychological portraitist. He likes the look of a snapshot way too much. He would rather give a voice to plain people much, one cannot help feeling, like him. He would rather, too, that they speak for themselves.

They do in words for "Class Pictures," in facing text. One girl starts right off by boasting that speaks four languages. The greatest doubt comes from a light-skinned Muslim in a skullcap: "sometimes I wonder how other people look at me." Bey's self-questioning and sensitivity to children has made him a natural for past shows of "Visions of Childhood," "Grief and Grievance," and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He has been among black photographers like Ming Smith in the Kamoinge Workshop, Ming Smith in Harlem, and the 2005 artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

He may have made his greatest mark, though, in leaving Harlem once more to seek out history. He shot "The Birmingham Project" in 2012, on the fiftieth anniversary of a church bombing in Alabama. Each photo pairs a seated adult and child, in separate frames but sharing a church or the Birmingham Museum. The child is of the same age as the children who died that day, and the adult is the age that they would have become. They could be Bey's familiar parents and children all the same. Elsewhere he turns to counters and other plain interiors in color, for others to complete their history.

He traveled in 2017 to stops on the Underground Railroad, for "Night Coming Tenderly, Black." The series title, from Langston Hughes, describes the tenderness but also the darkness, far underexposed and, for the first time, with not a person in sight. Those seeking freedom left long ago. Yet the stops still stand for hope. The curators, Elisabeth Sherman and SF MOMA's Corey Keller, keep the show undercrowded. It dwells less on the accumulated impact of a series than on the boasts, the bonds, the restlessness, and the hope.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"But Still, It Turns" ran at the International Center of Photography through May 9, 2021, Dawoud Bey at The Whitney Museum of American Art through October 3.