Outsider with a Camera
Harlem Photographs. 1932-1940.
by Aaron Siskind.
With a new introduction by Maricia Battle. Foreword by Gordon Parks. Smithsonian Institution Press. 80 pp. $17.95.
The republication of Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Photographs, in a new edition prepared to complement an exhibition mounted by the National Museum of American Art, is a welcome event. For in Siskind’s images one recaptures something of that amazingly rich decade of the 1930’s when Harlem became the capital of the black American world.
The virtues of Siskind’s vision of Harlem are readily perceived: a brilliant documentary sensibility coupled with a formal grace which in nearly every photo manages to convey hardship without ignoring the strength and dignity of the men, women, and children who inhabit the streets. The sources of his photography, too, are clear enough: Siskind had an interest in writing and music (he was an English teacher in the New York City public-school system), and was involved in politics and oratory (he had been a member of the Young People’s Socialist League).
In her introduction to this volume, Maricia Battle follows Sis-kind’s evolution as a documentary photographer. In her judgment, the images produced by him serve to “proclaim the aesthetic priorities” of one who “with only the best of intentions made a nation aware of its economic injustice and to hope for social reform.” Gordon Parks, in his foreword, similarly points to the way in which, 50 years later, “joy, sorrow, happiness, and despair still hang out together” in these images. Yet there are curious errors both of omission and commission in this view of the Siskind photographs.
With several noteworthy exceptions, all of Siskind’s work is street work. That is to say, these are images of public places and public action. Here we have the mandatory marchers, strikers, dancers, musicians, actors, streetwalkers. But private life, what went on behind the walls of the tenements of Lenox Avenue and the mansions of Sugar Hill, is simply absent. We see a janitor in front of his building with a sign, “Furnished Room To Let,” but we get no taste of that room or the life within it.
In part, this is the perennial problem of the outsider with a camera. In part, it is a limitation of the photographic medium as such—the difficulty which it has in touching matters of the soul. But in large part it was also a problem in the socialist vision of that decade, which took for granted that everything important was happening in the streets.
That is why the written text in this volume, derived from materials developed by the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930’s, is so important. Through the narratives and poems that surround the photos we approach the reality of black life in Harlem with an intensity and meaning absent from Siskind’s documentary pictures. It is the word rather than the image that gives us a strong sense of Harlem life.
To begin with, there are the wonderful peddler poems of Clyde “Kingfish” Smith. One example will have to suffice: “Say, ice man, I want some today.// So hurry up and bring it,/ Before I go away.// Bring fifty pound,/ And hurry right down,/ Cause you got/ The best ice in this town.// You can chop it up/ And make it small,/ Better bring it quick/ Or not at all.// I want to put it on my fish/ Because it’s nice and hot,/ And I better do something/ Before they rot.”
The children’s street rhymes are equally fine, and deserve a place in that tiny pantheon of memorable verse for and by the very young. Here is one that I can remember singing myself as a Jewish child in Harlem: “Joe Louis/ Don’t catch me/ Catch that man behind the tree/ He stole apples/ I stole none/ Put him in jail just for fun.”
At the other end of the spectrum is a 1939 interview (conducted by the novelist Ralph Ellison) of one Jim Barber, a sometime musician-singer. Jim Barber sees everything through the prism (or is it the prison?) of black-white relations. Even when he goes home to eat he cannot get beyond his daily hatreds: “When I get home, gonna cook the cabbage and bacon, gonna make me some corn fritters and set back in my twenty-five-dollars-a-month room and eat my fritters and cabbage and tell the Jews to forgit it!” He dreams of the pending Hitlerite invasion of Europe, when “All the white folks’ll be killing off one another.” But beyond that dream is only despair. For “when Negroes start running things I’ll have to get off the earth before it’s too late!”
The photos of Aaron Siskind never quite make contact with the Jim Barbers of Harlem. To Jewish socialists like Siskind, black people were to be seen only as potential allies in the coming class struggle. Today, of course, there is no mistaking the fact that nationalism and not old-fashioned socialism is the credo of the dispossessed, just as the symbolism of Islam has displaced that of Christianity and drugs have replaced gambling as the common language of the body. The destructive energy of the 1990’s has triumphed over the creative energy of the 1930’s. One wonders, indeed, whether an artistic descendant could or would be moved to photograph the externals of Harlem today as Aaron Siskind did 50 years ago. If the purpose of books like this one is to stimulate such thoughts about how far we have failed to come in the cause of human understanding, then Harlem Photographs: 1932-1940 succeeds admirably.
