Timeless photographs of everyday Harlem ’90s life
Uptown Odyssey — Gerald Cyrus’s new photobook collates cinematic shots of the neighbourhood’s street life and jazz bars, capturing the vibrancy of the bygone era.
After getting his start in accounting, Los Angeles native Gerald Cyrus hit the brakes and started thinking of a new direction for his life. After receiving a camera for Christmas ’83, serendipity struck: he saw Conversations with Roy DeCarava, a short documentary narrated by Alex Haley at a film festival. DeCarava’s hypnotic portrait of Black America during the 20th century struck a chord. “I had never seen that kind of photography. It lit a fire under me,” says Cyrus, who immediately signed up for a night course at a local high school where he learned basic skills. “After that class, I was smitten.”
As fate would have it, Roland Charles and Calvin Hicks had just opened the Black Gallery (1984−1998) to support Black photographers in Leimert Park, the neighbourhood where Cyrus grew up. “Having that as an anchor where I could interact with other Black photographers, and learn and be mentored by them, was very significant in my development as a photographer,” he says.
On his own, Cyrus visited the library, where he could study masters of the form: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and André Kertész alongside Kamoinge photographers Ming Smith, Lou Draper, and Beuford Smith – not knowing that one day in 2000, he would receive an invitation to join The Kamoinge Workshop, the legendary Black photography collective co-founded by DeCarava in 1963.
In 1990, Cyrus arrived in New York to pursue his MFA at the School of Visual Arts. The following year he moved to Harlem, where he lived on the top floor of a limestone row house. He began documenting the community during a period of transition, crafting a portrait of people and place collected Uptown Odyssey (TBW Books). The book brings together scenes of everyday life etched into the cultural landscape and preserves them for our collective memory. “I remember the energy of walking the streets of Harlem; you never knew what you might encounter around any corner. The vibrancy and unpredictability of it all kept you on your toes,” he says.
A regular at fabled jazz bars like Lenox Lounge, St. Nick’s, and La Familia, Cyrus chronicled the end of an era as the millennium came to a close. Here the simple pleasures of life take centre stage: a live band, smoke filled club, folks of all ages dancing, laughing, canoodling, lost in the moment. “Things seemed more grounded,” he remembers. “Materiality was a much bigger fact of life, as opposed to the virtual reality we live in now.”
That materiality is the hallmark of Cyrus’s work, as evidenced by his expert printing techniques. In a masterful essay that opens the book, Gioncarlo Valentine takes us on a whirlwind tour through Cyrus’s practice. “The first thing I noticed was the musicality of Gerald’s printing process – half ceremony, half choreography,” he writes. “Looking through his sumptuous prints is one experience, but watching them be born, watching him move through his darkroom with the elegance and familiarity of a veteran dancer … was its own rapturous experience.”
While printing the photographs in Uptown Odyssey, Cyrus had on WBGO, New York’s legendary jazz radio station, or popped in cassettes tape from Miles, Monk, Mingus, and Trane while he worked. “One of the things that appealed to me from the start was the process of working in the darkroom,” he says. “I don’t know if I would’ve been as attracted to the medium if it were just a matter of shooting the film and turning it over to someone else to develop and print. There’s something about being in that very dim, safe lit room, with music going, just being in your own world where you can explore your vision as a photographer.”
Uptown Odyssey by Gerald Cyrus is published by TBW Books.
Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.
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