In 1936, Aaron Siskind, a founding member of the Photo League, brought together a group of young photographers to survey New York’s neighborhoods.
The “Harlem Document” would become their most famous study. Its principal objectives were to produce evidence of a neighborhood in peril — from substandard housing to inadequate health care — and to promote reform. One of the document’s most important artifacts, a photo essay published in Look magazine in May 1940, offers insights into the way the largely white documentary team represented the African-American community from the outside.
The article’s view of Harlem was unremittingly grim. It stressed the community’s misfortune while ignoring its rich history, cultural life and the many residents who endured, and even flourished, in spite of hardships.
Essay
Race Stories
A continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race by the professor and curator Maurice Berger.
A photograph of a cleaning woman, stooped over and washing a floor, for example, was meant to convey the work that kept black Americans “in their place.” An apparently joyous image of residents perched on fire escapes to watch a parade was transformed by its caption into a sobering thesis on substandard housing. Photographs of “typical Harlem boys” characterized them as “delinquents in the making.”
Mr. Siskind would later concede that the document distorted its subject. “There were a lot of wonderful things going on in Harlem,” he said. “And we never showed most of them.”
Indeed, the group decided during one of its meetings that while the neighborhood’s crime rate was not unusually high, it would remain focused on the subject. “Even if Harlem does not have a greater proportion of crime, a good many people are under the impression that it does,” they concluded.
Seventy-four years later, a new book by the photographer Stephen Shames titled “Bronx Boys” (University of Texas Press) rekindles questions about the responsibilities inherent in documenting a community.
“Bronx Boys” chronicles a group of young men coming of age in an environment besieged by poverty, drugs and gang warfare. It focuses on a subculture of “crews,” informal associations of mostly adolescent men teamed together for protection and companionship.
Mr. Shames began the project in 1977 photographing the Fordham Bedford and Bathgate sections of the Bronx while on assignment for Look magazine. Mr. Shames frequently returned to the area over the next 22 years and continued to photograph the men.
“These are pictures of friends, people whom I met as children and who became my family, as well as people who stepped in front of my camera once and afterward disappeared forever,” Mr. Shames recalled in “Bronx Boys.” “I watched my friends grow up, fall in love, have children of their own … A few, including my two godsons, have made it. Many others are dead or in jail.”
Mr. Shames’s passion and dedication as well as his ability to empathize with his subjects — he points to his own abusive childhood as a point of connection — helped him gain their trust as well as unfettered access to their lives. Two of the men, Martin Dones and José “Poncho” Muñoz, have contributed autobiographical texts to the book.
Subjective and moody, “Bronx Boys” is rich with visual and narrative drama much like the photographs of the “Harlem Document.” But Mr. Shames’s intimate focus on a subculture, results in a partial view of a community that he refers to, in the book, only as the Bronx.
Mr. Shames documents, at close range, the relationships, romances and play of his subjects. But he also dwells on aberrance, criminality and addiction: A daredevil leaping between the roofs of tenement buildings; a cordoned-off crime scene; a dealer selling crack; teenagers smoking, drinking and shooting up drugs; a perpetrator slumped in the backseat of a police car; gang members, no older than teenagers, wielding guns.
Acknowledging that “people adapt, survive, and even prosper in this urban moonscape of quick pleasures and false hopes,” Mr. Shames nonetheless portrays a Bronx that could well be the moon, a desolate place depicted in stifling and foreboding images.
The reality of poverty in the Bronx, however, was far more complicated. Although some young people joined gangs or succumbed to drugs, many more did not. And despite stereotypes to the contrary, the borough was — and remains — a place rich with history, politics, and culture.
This complexity informs Lisa Kahane’s “Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987” (powerHouse). Published in 2008, the book does not shy away from the tragedy of almost unimaginable urban decay and neglect. But “however impoverished the landscape,” as Ms. Kahane observed, “life went on, which was awesome. No building in the Bronx was truly abandoned.”
“Do Not Give Way to Evil” brims with the vitality of individuals going about their everyday activities in the face of adversity: They rush to work, shop, hug their friends, pick wildflowers in an abandoned garden, attend a street fair, congregate on a stoop and listen to music.
Ms. Kahane represents these lives through a broad cultural and social lens. She portrays the privation, rubble and despair. But she also documents the markets, fashion, landmarks, public art, demonstrations, protest banners and political graffiti that defined the South Bronx and attested to the grit and self-possession of many of its residents.
Her book resonates with nuance and complexity, qualities evident as well in commendable projects by Mr. Shames about fatherhood, multiracial Americans, and the Black Panthers. Such nuance requires a process of observing and learning, diversifying relationships and knowledge, engaging history and thinking outside of oneself and beyond clichés. It necessitates, as well, the recognition that progressive politics and good intentions do not alleviate the need for this education.
In his introduction to “Bronx Boys,” Mr. Shames sums up his relationship to a place of “terrible beauty, stark and harsh, like the desert.” “Often I am terrified of the Bronx,” he wrote. “Other times it feels like home. My images reflect the feral vitality and hope of these young men.”
The word “feral” transforms an observation about the borough Mr. Shames passionately documented into a stereotype of the people he photographed. That this adjective — from the Latin fera, wild animal — would be applied to human beings is troubling. That it would pass, seemingly unnoticed, from photographer, to editor, to publisher reminds us that as far as we have come since the days of the “Harlem Document,” a lot more work needs to be done.
Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.
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