New York After Dark: The Photography of Cal Swanson | Exhibition Catalog | OSilas Gallery

WELCOME

NEW YORK AFTER DARK 1975–1985

OSilas Gallery is pleased to present this wonderful exhibition of black and white photography by Cal Swanson in OSilas Gallery. At the time these photographs were taken, Cal was a young man following his passion—photography.

Every evening, he would take the train from Westchester into Grand Central Station and wander the streets of midtown, approaching strangers to take their pictures in an attempt to capture something of their personalities that showed through in their eyes and expressions. With New York City as his background, he was able to evoke both the grittiness and vibe of the city while focusing his lens on the person in front of him.

We are proud to note that Cal is an alumnus of Concordia College New York. He graduated in 1970 from Concordia Junior College: the all men’s two-year college that would soon become the Concordia College of today.

We are pleased to welcome Cal back to campus and to showcase his work in New York After Dark (1975 – 1985): The Photography of Cal Swanson.

I hope you enjoy the show!

Elizabeth Vranka Executive Director

THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF CAL SWANSON

AT DUSK Cal Swanson leaves for Manhattan on a Metro North commuter

train having paid $5.00 for the round trip ticket and knowing he will take the return ride within two hours. Coming from his parents’ home in suburban Eastchester, only forty-five minutes away, he timed an arrival into Grand Central Station to sync up with sunset and the disarray of rush hour. Once at the terminal, he makes a choice among his typical and reliable walking routes: head northward towards Midtown to confront the masses of streaming businesspeople leaving work - dressed in suits, wearing polished shoes and carrying briefcases - or move westward toward Times Square where he was guaranteed to encounter the unexpected.

Today, Swanson decides to journey uptown. He walks the street with a small, handheld camera hanging down around his neck, always looking ahead, while moving against the tide of people as they embark on a journey home. For the photographer, the crowd is a flowing visual field. From inside of it, he notices a person’s face at a distance, typically their eyes, as they move closer towards one another. Within seconds he is empowered to approach this stranger, asking to take a picture, never demanding a pose or a smile, but a simple request for her to look back at him. Swanson quickly holds up the camera to his face, decides on the number of feet to step away from his subject, takes three or four snaps, thanks the person, and carries on his way in search of the next picture.

Swanson was dedicated to this counter-commute and taking instantaneous portraits of anonymous subjects between 1975 and 1985. When he first began this photographic study of the human face and body, he was in his early twenties, living with his parents while taking art classes in Manhattan.

By the time he was finished ten years later, Swanson’s life had undergone meaningful change. He was by that point in his thirties, met his wife, lived in Brooklyn, settled back in Westchester, started a family, and began working in the healthcare industry. Yet rather than turn the camera on his own world, throughout this decade of maturing life, he consistently made time for a photographic project that ultimately documented change among the masses of urbanites around him.

The mid-1970s through 1980s was a period of significant transformation for New York. In October 1975, the Daily News published the memorable headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” after the federal government denied it the aid needed to prevent bankruptcy. More than just a financial decision, it was also intended as a moral chastening, directed toward a city equally plagued by infrastructural decay, racial discord, and political strain. This plight was captured in real time by a number of photographers walking the city streets. They, like Swanson, were drawn to subjects who embodied its successes and those who were marred as victims of a city in defeat, as well as the many whose daily-lives left them somewhere in-between.

Historically, documentary photography in the United States has held a function of urban reform through the cultivation of shock and empathy in its viewers, as with the work of Jacob Riis who captured the squalid living

conditions in the tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the end of the 19th century or the photographers of the New Deal federal projects in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, the early, candid portraits by Paul Strand, including the memorable image of a women wearing a tin sign around her neck, Blind (1916) or Walker Evans’s stoic portraits, such as Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife (1936), force its viewer to look deeper into the picture, towards the face and the body of the subject in pursuit of a knowable truth. In so doing, these pictures communicate an aesthetics of conscientiousness, showing portraiture’s capacity to uncover fleeting moments of an individual’s humanity.

The mid-20th century saw changes in the valuation of photography within the realm of art: its museums formed institutional collections, its commercial galleries focused entirely on presenting the work of historic and contemporary photographers, and its practitioners explored new formal languages to capture the spirit of modern life. Within this expanding context, some photographers reconsidered the social function of their chosen medium as they continued to work in a documentarian mode, while others applied a documentary-like style to their personally-expressive images.

For both, the city street operated

as a conduit to explore the photograph as a record of both reality and subjectivity, and portraiture became a means to register its impact on a human level.

SEEN ALL TOGETHER, SWANSON’S BLACK-ANDWHITE PHOTOGRAPHS REVEAL THAT THE PICTURETAKING PROCESS SERVED AS A MEANS OF PERSONAL, IMAGE MAKING. His corpus demonstrates

how the artist saw through the anonymous, urban masses to cast a social landscape inhabited by worthwhile individuals living in both the mainstream and in its margins. At the same time, it also shows that this vision demanded in-the-moment organization of its subjects in order to make sense of the human chaos of the New York City streets. Less like August Sander’s hierarchical stratification of German society, Swanson developed a democratic typology of portraits in which the individual strangers were captured at one of three distances, borrowed from traditional studio formats: full-length, in which the costumed subject stands within a locational context; three-quarter length or waist-up, in which the body is cropped to restrict visual information that in turn heightens awareness of a pose; and the headshot, in which the facial expression or mood overwhelms the person.

With his simple request not to smile, Swanson’s portraiture sought out a subjecthood located behind the rote response to a camera lens – which was typically demanded by the prompt “say cheese.”

Instead, most all of his subjects have a fixed stare, returning the inquisitive gaze of the photographer in silent commune. This is seen most acutely in his closely-cropped portraits of sitters from their waist up: a women in full make-up, wearing a leather cap and work apron layered on top of a winter jacket; a young man with his arms folded wearing a vest without a shirt on underneath exposing taut, muscular arms; a man with a bruised and bloodied face with an eyepatch; and a young woman wearing an unbuttoned fur coat.

Swanson’s full-length portraits showcase differing manners of pose and dress that aid in the communication of self-perception and provoke the viewer’s narrativization. An older man wearing a white sports coat, white tie, and black slacks holds a cigarette with one hand while the other rests calmly in his pants pocket, besides a door that is slightly ajar. In another, a young man wearing a dark leather coat, blue jeans, and a white baseball cap turned backwards, stands on the sidewalk dwarfed in front of a shiny, marble wall. His hands hover at his sides, mouth is closed, face is at rest and his head bent softly to the side.

A third photograph shows a woman in a floral dress and white highheeled sandals leaning over a pew with her hands clasped and fingers inter-twined, likely disrupted in mid-prayer. Yet, not all of the subjects show complete obedience to Swanson’s request. Some appear to smirk, one lifts her hands in timidity as if to silently ask back “who me?,” another pauses before or after taking a scoop of yogurt, many appear to habitually flick their cigarettes in the moments before and after the image is taken.

Swanson’s inherent systemization of portrait type and blanket of uniformity cast by the black-and-white film, proper lighting, and compositional balance creates visual harmony on behalf of the spectator. Yet, the individual photographs of the ordinary people are as varied as their subjects’ personalities, and depict equally diverse material conditions. Swanson passes no judgement on the worlds inside or outside of the portrait and very little of New York street life appears in these pictures. Instead, the city serves an architectural backdrop of terrazzo, stone, concrete, brick, tile, metal, glass, and wood. Rather, in the photographs, the changing city is documented through Swanson’s chance encounter with myriad denizens who wear its psychological impact across their faces and who don its evolving fashions as armor.

Once it approaches 8pm, the transformation from day into night is complete. Similarly, Swanson is exhausted from wandering across midtown Manhattan and talking to its inhabitants. He is done for the day, ready to leave the city, and reenter the domestic reality of a household waiting for him in suburban Westchester. On the train ride home he starts thinking about tomorrow’s return and situating himself amidst the chaos of humanity.

NEVER NEVER DEMANDING DEMANDING A POSE A POSE OR A SMILE, OR A SMILE, BUT A SIMPLE BUT A SIMPLE REQUEST REQUEST FOR HER FOR HER TO LOOK TO LOOK BACK BACK

BIOS CAL SWANSON is a lifelong student and practitioner of photography. He has taken courses at institutions including the National Academy of Design and Pratt Institute, culminating in an MFA in printmaking from Lehman College, City University of New York in 2002. Swanson attended Concordia Junior College (Bronxville, New York) from 1969-1970.

Although his interest has always been in the visual arts, he spent most of his working life in the health care field. In 2008 he was accepted into the viewing program of the Drawing Center in Soho.

LAUREN ROSENBLUM is a Ph.D. student in art history at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other institutions.

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

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All photographs in the exhibition were taken and developed by Cal Swanson circa 1975-1985. All are gelatin silver prints and are on loan courtesy of the photographer.

1 Untitled [52nd St. and 5th Ave.] 2 Untitled [58th St. and 5th Ave.] 3 Untitled [Park Ave in the low-50’s] 4 U ntitled [50th St. between 5th and 6th Ave.]

5 Untitled [Trump Tower] 6 U ntitled [43rd St. between 7th and 8th Ave.]

7 Untitled [34th St. and Broadway] 8 Untitled [5th Ave. and 58th St.] 9 Untitled [Grand Central Station] 10 Untitled [41st St. and 8th Ave.] 11 Untitled [Grand Central Station] 12 U ntitled [51st St. between 5th

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and 6th Ave.]

13 U ntitled [Rockefeller Center Ice Skating Rink]

14 Untitled [Fifth Ave. in the mid-50’s] 15 Untitled [Times Square] 16 Untitled [Midtown] 17 Untitled [General Motors Building] 18 Untitled [5th Ave. in the mid-50’s] 19 Untitled [5th Ave. in the mid-50’s] 20 Untitled [5th Ave. in the mid-50’s] 21 Untitled [Saint Patrick’s Cathedral] 22 Untitled [East 50’s] 23 Untitled [Grand Central Station] 24 Untitled [5th Ave. and 58th St.] 25 Untitled [General Motors Building] 26 Untitled [5th Ave. and 52nd St.] 27 U ntitled [Chock Full O’Nuts, Broadway and 43rd St.]

28 U ntitled [Port Authority Bus Terminal]

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29 Untitled [5th Ave. and 57th St.] 30 Untitled [5th Ave. in the 50’s] 31 Untitled [58th St. and 5th Ave.] 32 Untitled [West side in the mid-40’s] 33 Untitled [Fifth Ave. in the 50’s] 34 Untitled [West 50’s]

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35 Untitled [West 40’s] 36 Untitled [West side in the low 50’s] 37 Untitled [Fifth Ave.] 38 Untitled [8th Ave. in the 40’s] 39 Untitled [New York City] 40 Untitled [Port Authority Bus Terminal] 41 Untitled [Port Authority Bus Terminal] 42 Untitled [5th Ave and 54th St.] 43 Untitled [57th St. between 5th and 6th Ave.] 44 Untitled [57th St.] 45 Untitled [West side in the upper 50’s] 46 Untitled [50’s between 5th and 6th Ave.] 47 Untitled [East 40’s] 48 Untitled [57th St. and Madison Ave.] 49 Untitled [8th Ave. between 42nd and 43rd St.] 50 Untitled [Plaza Hotel] 51 Untitled [42nd St. between 7th and 8th Ave.]

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