New York Stories: ‘Eminent Domain’ at NYPL

Romana Javitz was a great librarian. Javitz (1903-80) served as head of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection from 1929 until her mandated retirement in 1968. Her two major accomplishments at NYPL were the development of protocols for cataloging images so they could conveniently be located (these were widely adopted by other libraries), and realizing the importance of collecting and preserving photographs of New York City. Among other things, “Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City,” the exhibition organized by Stephen Pinson, the library’s current curator of photography, is a tribute to Romana Javitz’s foresight.“Eminent Domain” fills Gottesman Hall with the work of five photographers and wall texts by a sixth, each of whom documents a unique experience of the city. The work of each of the different photographers is distinct, reflecting their different concerns and techniques. Thomas Holton’s “The Lams of Ludlow Street” (2003-05) is a traditional photo essay about a Chinese immigrant family living in Chinatown. Mr. Holton himself is half Chinese and pursued this project as a way of connecting with his Chinese heritage. The Lams are a young couple with three appealing little children. Mr. Holton photographed them in their crowded apartment, followed them around the city, recorded visitors, and supplemented his own photographs by including Polaroid pictures the Lam children took with a camera he provided.There is a picture of the family standing shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen with five place settings squeezed on the table; a metal rod crossing the room near the ceiling is used to hang the family’s jackets, neatly arranged by size. In another picture, Mrs. Lam supervises the three children — two boys and a girl — as they play together with plastic toys in the bathtub; a battery of plastic clothes hangers, grouped by color, waits for her to set out the family wash. We understand that the Lams’s conditions are circumscribed, but the orderliness of the cramped apartment and their generally determined attitude inspire confidence that they will follow other immigrants out of the Lower East Side into a more comfortable America.Reiner Leist’s “Window” (1995-present) is a much more conceptual project. In March 1995, Mr. Leist began photographing from the window of his apartment on the 26th floor of a commercial building on Eighth Avenue in Midtown. Virtually every day since, when he has been in the city, he has set his 19th-century view camera loaded with 8-by-10-inch black-and-white film on the table near the window, and made an exposure. Now his several thousands of images, taken at different times of day, in different weather conditions, with various occasional objects on the table blocking part of the view, chronicle the development of a significant swath of Manhattan. There are 65 of Mr. Leist’s “Window” pictures in Gottesman Hall, the images for September 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, from the years 1995 through 2007, mounted in a tight grid. The most startling change, of course, is the disappearance from the pictures taken on September 12, 2001, and afterward of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.Zoe Leonard acknowledges the influence of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans on her project, “Analogue” (1998-2007). Ms. Leonard documented the disappearance of small retail and service shops around the city, the “mom-and-pop” stores that are being replaced by outlets of national and international chains. Her images are less complex than Atget’s photographs of store windows and sidewalk displays in fin de siècle Paris, but her careful use of color provides a different sort of interest. In “Black Shoes on Blue Tarp” (2004) the electric blue of the plastic sets off the shiny black leather of the low-end shoes (only one from each pair) arranged in neat rows on the ground. In “Century Photo Centre” (2004) the bright yellow of the diminutive storefront replicates the corporate yellow of the Kodak photographic materials it advertises for sale. In “Red & White Restaurant” (1999) the alternating vertical bands of pure color under the display window contrast with the golden brown colors of the fried foods being sold. And Ms. Leonard shares Evans’s affection for handmade signs.Like Mr. Leist’s “Window,” Ethan Levitas’s “Untitled/This is just to say” (2004-07) is rigidly conceptual. He photographed subways in the elevated train lines that service working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, cropping the pictures tightly so they include only the sides of the subway cars; nothing is seen above or below. What we have is variations on a theme. The sides of the cars vary in the extent of their deterioration, and the people glimpsed in the windows are as variable as New York’s heterogeneous population. In “#64” (2005) bearded Chasidim occupy most of the windows. In “#32” (2004) a Hispanic couple kisses in one window, and individual black and Hispanic men and women look out the other windows. In “#57” (2005) the train is eerily empty, but someone has scratched “MALICE” into the glass of one window.Finally, Bettina Johae rode her bicycle about 509 miles along the borders of the five boroughs and took more than 7,000 exposures, before editing them down to 2,418 straightforward documentary photographs to create “borough edges, nyc” (2004-07). The project takes us to Port Morris in the Bronx, Marble Hill in Manhattan, Rosedale in Queens, Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn, and Rossville on Staten Island. These are neighborhoods most of us are unlikely to encounter outside Ms. Johae’s pictures at the library.That’s what Romana Javitz had in mind.wmmeyers@nysun.comUntil August 29 (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, 212-592-7730).

New York Stories: ‘Eminent Domain’ at NYPL

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