East 100th St.

BRUCE DAVIDSON'S “East 100th Street”— an exhibit of more than 40 prints now on view at the Museum of Modern Art —is a selection taken from the just published book by the same title. Both, in turn, were selected from a much larger body of work, created by Davidson over two year period, which was devoted almost exclusively to photographing one particular block in the East Harlem ghetto. Davidson, whom historian Peter Pollack has described as “something of a romantic,” took almost every conceivable precaution to in validate charges that he was exploiting the subculture he recorded. It was not a quickie project, but a long term study. Davidson decided against using a hand held camera, and chose instead to work with a large view camera on a tripod—thus eliminating, any hope of secrecy, or of shoot and run techniques, and forcing himself to be open, planted and vulnerable. He gave away several thousand prints to the residents of the block, and made sure that they all got copies of the book when it was published. Members of the community were invited to and attended the show's opening. Davidson even has plans for using the book as lever to get funds and other sorts of assistance for the neighborhood.

Davidson's intent, therefore, went far beyond mere profiteering off an oppressed subculture, and there is no questioning the sincerity of his motives or his commitment to his subjects. As he says in his brief preface to the book, “I entered a life style, and, like the people who live on the block, I love and hate it and I keep going back. Yet, at the risk of being accused (as I often am) of “injecting politics into aesthetic criticism”—conjuring up images of myself as a mad doctor out of a Terry Southern novel, poised above the typewriter cackling maniacally and wielding a gigantic hypodermic—I must make clear my belief that “East 100th Street” cannot, by its very nature, be discussed as though its aesthetic import were completely divorced from its “political” significance, for the two are very much intertwined—inseparably so, in fact.

If this were not so, then Davidson would surely have felt no need to take these extensive precautions listed above—for, in a “nonpolitical” context, charges of rip ping off repressed subcultures are never made. Dorothea Lange did not have to placate anyone by giving away prints, nor Walker Evans, nor Lewis Hine. I am not saying that Davidson should not have done so; the situation obviously demanded it, and Davidson acknowledged the rightness of that obligation and fulfilled it. But that the demand was there, even if tacitly, even if only in Davidson's conscience, does prove that the situation has ether than aesthetic ramifications. This is because, in the context of East Harlem, Davidson is inarguably not only an outsider but an alien. He is neither black nor Puerto Rican, but white; he may, like the block's residents, “love and hate” this ghetto—but, unlike them, he has the option of leaving which is implicit in his impulse to “keep going back.”

Does this mean that Davidson's work—or, for that matter, any white photographer's documentation of non whites —is invalid? By no means. But it does imply that such work, no matter how good— and Davidson's is very good indeed—is limited. Limited because, no matter how insightful a white photographer may be, and despite all precautions he may take, he remains white and therefore alien. Thus, even when there is mutual admiration and respect between photographer and subject, there is automatically a barrier, for they stand on different sides of the socio cultural fence. This is apparent in all of Davidson's images, noticeable as a guarded quality, a wariness on the parts of the photographer and his subjects. There is a thin line being trodden in these images, and it is something more than the already difficult process of making a portrait. Something is being kept back by the subjects, and while Davidson has recorded that keeping back process superbly, he hasn't caught the something that was withheld.

Perhaps this is because, in a peculiar way, Davidson himself is withholding something—there is a caution in his eyes as well as in those of his subjects. It expresses itself indirectly but nonetheless visibly, in the very fact that his images are, without exception, beautiful. Not grim, not ugly, not chilling— even the photograph of a rat scuttling across a garbage strewn alley brings no shivers of revulsion. This is one of the paradoxes of contemporary documentary photography, and Davidson is not to be faulted for coming up against it. However, if photography is to help change (and not just record) such horrors as the conditions on East 100th Street, then photographers are going to have to abandon their concern with Art and Beauty and start making stark, grim, ugly, repulsive images—images so ghastly that none of us will be able to eat or sleep or go to museums until we know that such conditions no longer exist. We need images as strong, as simple, as “artless” as those of Hine and Riis, for anything less permits us the delusion that this brutalization of the human spirit serves some purpose, if only to provide photographers with ripe subject matter.

But even those photographs, if they come—as I pray they will, and soon—will not be enough if they are made exclusively by white photographers. If we are to come to terms with the situation, as a first step toward improving it, then we need to hear (and see) from the other side. We need, in short, exhibits by the best minority photographers —not held uptown, but hung in the same museums and galleries as those by whites. It is little short of scandalous that the Museum of Modern Art has never given a one man show to a non white photographer, for there are many at least as talented as some of those photographers the Museum has chosen to show over the years. This closed circuit—where by, in museums, in galleries and in publications, we see images of non white subcultures taken exclusively by whites—must be broken, and broken now. To do so at this tormented moment, not furtively but by conscious and announced decision, would be an act of courage, not cowardice. Out of the resulting contrasts might come what is so desperately needed a fuller and deeper understanding of what it means to be black (and white!) in America today.