Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design presents a selection of works from photographer Stephen Wilkes’ “Day to Night” series at Grand Central

 Via Art Daily

December 30, 2023

Central Park, View from Essex House, NYC, Day To Night ™ © Stephen Wilkes. Courtesy MTA Arts & Design.

"Day to Night" explores the circadian rhythms of New York's iconic landmarks and vibrant city life

NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design is now presenting a selection of works from photographer Stephen Wilkes’ mesmerizing “Day to Night” series at Grand Central Madison. Iconic New York landmarks, including Coney Island, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, and Washington Square, are rendered anew thanks to the artist’s unique approach to photography, creating images of familiar destinations across the Big Apple that span the course of an entire day.

-"This Fragile Earth Day To Night", a special virtual exhibit, is on through January 21, 2024 at monroegallery.com -

“These fascinating photographs showcase New York City at its very finest, reminding residents and tourists alike of our spectacular city’s tremendous vitality and its unique ability to inspire awe, delight, and wonderment,” said Sandra Bloodworth, Director, MTA Arts & Design. “Those passing through Grand Central Madison will immediately recognize several renowned locations created in Stephen Wilkes’ unique image-making style, which captures the essence of a single place from dawn until dark.”

The ongoing “Day to Night” series explores the temporal and circadian rhythms of daily life in landmark locations from around the world. Working from a fixed camera angle, Wilkes takes up to 1,500 images over the course of a day then edits the best moments of the entire day, using time as his guide. These select moments are then digitally blended into a single photograph.

The photos on display at Grand Central Madison were chosen by MTA Arts & Design and the artist to reveal a range of New York City views, including the bustling landscapes of Rockefeller Center during the holidays, Central Park in its colorful fall glory, and Coney Island at the peak of summer. Together, these images serve as a lasting reminder of the energetic environs, both natural and human-made, that make New York City such a lively place to spend time. The exhibition is curated by MTA Arts & Design and generously sponsored by Duggal Visual Solutions with installation support by OUTFRONT Media. The photographs will be on view until Spring 2024.

“It is so special for me to share these New York ‘Day to Night’ images within the stunning Grand Central Madison cultural corridor. New York has always been a source of great inspiration and my ‘Day to Night’ project began as a love letter to New York City. I was drawn to photograph the most iconic locations within the city, views that are part of our collective memory, but seen in a totally different light. I photograph from locations and views that are part of our collective memory,” said Westport, Connecticut-based artist Stephen Wilkes. “I capture what I see, the fleeting moments of humanity and light as time passes. Photographing a single place for up to 36 hours becomes a meditation. It has informed me in a unique way, inspiring deep insights into the narrative story of life, and the fragile interaction of humanity within our natural world.”

Located at the south end of the concourse by the 42nd Street entrance, MTA Arts & Design Photography at Grand Central Madison was inaugurated in 2023. The curated exhibition series is installed in ten large-scale lightboxes and rotated periodically. The Photography initiative is part of the larger Grand Central Madison “cultural corridor,” a new venue for artistic expression curated by MTA Arts & Design. In addition to temporary photography exhibitions, the corridor includes lively permanent mosaic commissions by Yayoi Kusama and Kiki Smith and five large LED screens that display a widerange of temporary digital artworks from the MTA Arts & Design Digital Art Program, an annual open call initiative for digital artists. Taken together, these unique and publicly accessible artistic endeavors are a reminder of the enduring power of public art and its ability to connect people from all walks of life.

STEPHEN WILKES

Stephen Wilkes was born in 1957 in New York. He received his BS in photography from Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a minor in business management from the Whitman School of Management in 1980. Wilkes’ extensive awards and honors include the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography, Photographer of the Year from Adweek Magazine, Fine Art Photographer of the Year 2004 Lucie Award, TIME Magazine Top 10 Photographs of 2012, Sony World Photography Professional Award 2012, Adobe Breakthrough Photography Award 2012 and Prix Pictet, Consumption 2014. His photographs are included in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Dow Jones Collection, Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, Jewish Museum of NY, Library of Congress, Snite Museum of Art, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Museum of the City of New York, 9/11 Memorial Museum and numerous private collections. His editorial work has appeared in, and on the covers of leading publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Time, Fortune, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, and many others.

MTA ARTS & DESIGN MTA

Arts & Design encourages the use of public transportation by providing visual and performing arts in the metropolitan New York area. The Percent for Art program is one of the largest and most diverse collections of site-specific public art in the world, with more than 380 commissions by world-famous, midcareer and emerging artists. Arts & Design produces Graphic Arts, Digital Art, photographic Lightbox exhibitions, as well as live musical performances in stations through its Music Under New York (MUSIC) program, and the Poetry in Motion program in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America. It serves the millions of people who rely upon MTA subways and commuter trains and strives to create meaningful connections between sites, neighborhoods, and people.
MTA

New Book on The Photo League: “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York”

Via NY Jewish Week

September 27, 2023

A multi-generational group of people congregate on a building stoop on Hester Street; an African-American man leans on a lamppost; a gaggle of teenagers pile on top of each other at the beach in Coney Island; a hoard of children — in various states of undress — play with a broken mirror in the street. 

These are only a few examples of the 150 black-and-white snapshots of New York City street life in the 1930s and ’40s that appear in the new book “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York” by historian and scholar Deborah Dash Moore. The photos are the work of the New York Photo League, a group of socially conscious street photographers whose aim was to showcase the living conditions of the city’s working class, as well as spotlight their everyday lives and relationships.  (click for full article)

Dash Moore will be in conversation with Manhattan Borough Historian Robert W. Snyder at the Center for Jewish History on Thursday, Sept. 28.

Related: SONIA HANDELMAN MEYER & IDA WYMAN: TWO PIONEERING WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE PHOTO LEAGUE

A league of their own

 Via Pasatiempo

May 5, 2023

By Brian Sanford

In one image, an older woman sits on a bus, clutching her purse and looking pensive. In another, a man, his face obscured, gazes searchingly into an armpit-high trash bin. In a third, six children congregate in an empty lot with four-story row housing visible in the distance, their faces registering no signs of discomfort.

To observers in 2023, these septuagenarian images by two Photo League members offer candid views of daily life in a handful of American cities, primarily New York, as the shadow of World War II falls away. The images show little of the suffering that’s common in photographs from the Great Depression 15 years prior or the Vietnam War 15 years later. Yet to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark in 1947, the images of real life were sufficiently objectionable to land the Photo League on a list of groups considered “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive.”

The league was a collective of photographers, many of whom were women or first-generation Americans, who thought their work could improve social conditions in the United States. The collective had endured since 1936 but couldn’t survive the power-mad paranoia of McCarthyism, when a mere accusation of harboring communist sympathies was enough to destroy an association, a career, a life, a family. The league’s placement in 1948 on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations was the beginning of the end — preventing members from selling their work or getting passports — and it shuttered in 1951.

That’s 73 years ago. Remarkably, Sonia Handelman Meyer only recently died in 2022, at age 102, and Ida Wyman in 2019, at age 95. Work by both is featured in Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Two Pioneering Women Photographers of the Photo League, running through June 18 at the Monroe Gallery of Photography. The exhibit primarily features photographs from 1946 through 1950.

Sonia and Ida embrace at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida during a Photo League exhibit in 2013. 

Courtesy Joe Meyer/Monroe Gallery of Photography

At the exhibition’s opening April 21, Wyman’s granddaughter Heather Garrison and Meyer’s son Joe Meyer told a standing-room-only crowd about what inspired their famous photographer family members.

“If you’re wondering what a radical looks like, this old lady here in our backyard, this is what they look like,” Meyer says, pointing to a recent color image of his then-silver-haired mother. “Eventually, they can relax in front of the pond and chill out.”

Meyer then shows an image of his mother from her days in the Photo League, her hair still dark as she playfully balances herself while seated on a bucket, shooting the photographer a side-eyed look.

“This is what a radical looks like back in the day, when they were really active,” he says, proudly adding that his mother was born the year the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women nationwide the right to vote. That was 1920, eight years after New Mexico became a state.

Meyer says his mother continued working, giving lectures and signing prints, until her death last September.

Sonia Handelman Meyer, Girl on stairs, New York City (c. 1946-1950)

courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Sonia Handelman Meyer’s Boy wearing mask features a child tying his shoes while gazing impassively at the camera. In Girl on stairs, a little girl wearing a blouse stands in a stairwell, illuminated by light from the window behind her.

“She loved children,” Meyer says, while showing the audience Children playing in vacant lot, which he calls one of his mother’s most-loved images. ”You know, they’re the hope, and they’re innocent. And these kids, they’re having fun in their vacant lot. There’s no grass, but they’re going to make do, and they’re going to have fun. That touched her, and she captured it.”

Sonia Handelman Meyer had a twin-lens reflex camera, allowing her to look down and see exactly what the images she took would look like once they were developed, rather than having to gaze through a viewfinder and get an approximation. The technological setup allowed her to take photographs without being noticed, her son says, as she didn’t need to raise the camera to eye level.

“She had this like-minded circle of friends; she was kind of left-leaning, as the Photo League was,” he says of his mother’s ideology. “She was anti-war, pro-human rights, pro-women’s rights and equality, you name it.”

She also was afraid — of her government. While the Photo League resisted its demise at first, a member and longtime FBI informant testified in 1949 that the league was a front organization for the Communist Party.

“My parents lived underground in Philadelphia for three years because they were so freaked out, and she was freaked out about the FBI knocking on the door until the day she died,” Meyer says.

Photography funding

Garrison, showing the crowd the only known photo of Wyman’s first camera, says Wyman had to beg her father for the $5 to purchase it. Wyman got an unwanted lesson in overcoming adversity when the camera was stolen at a Woolworth’s store, but she saved enough from babysitting jobs to buy a replacement and joined the camera club in high school.

After graduating at age 17, Wyman had plans to enroll in nursing school but was still a minor.

Ida Wyman, Sidewalk Clock, New York City (1947); courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

“She called up every photo editor in New York City and asked for work, and they all laughed and hung up,” Garrison says. “She also called the [Associated Press] and United Press International and ACME Newspictures, and only ACME asked her to come down, but they offered her a job in the mailroom. The mailroom had vacancies because the men were going to war.” ACME was a U.S.-based news agency that operated from 1923 to 1952.

Wyman was promised the ACME role would lead to photography work, Garrison says, but she instead became a printer — an interest maintained throughout her life.

“She began taking photos of children playing in the neighborhood, beautiful buildings with brick, and she just spent time walking around New York,” Garrison says of Wyman’s early career. “She had a talent for connecting with people. As a child I was embarrassed by this, because at every bus stop in New York, she would just strike up a conversation with a stranger.”

As Wyman gained a reputation and clout, she landed a dream assignment for Life magazine. Life, with its wide pages and widespread circulation, focused on photography from 1936 until it ceased weekly publication in 1972.

While doing work for Life was appealing, the subject matter was not. The assignment involved photographing a group of women in Beverly Hills, California, Garrison says.

“Her [takeaway] was that the men doing work for Life kind of got the real assignments, and the women were left with the fluff,” she says.

Wyman stepped away from photography when she had children, as childcare was not financially feasible. By the time Wyman was ready to re-enter the workforce years later, Garrison says, she no longer received assignments and took a job as a medical photographer.

After a cancer scare, she decided at age 57 to rededicate herself to freelance feature photography, forgoing the pension she would have received had she kept her previous job.

“The staff and friends thought that she was crazy for leaving all this behind and going to an uncertain world,” Garrison says. “But she said nothing focuses the mind more than a near-death experience.”

Wyman continued printing in the second bedroom of her New York City apartment well into her 60s, her daughter says.

“I remember that when visitors were coming, we would move the bins of chemicals out of her bathtub so they wouldn’t see this darkroom in her bathroom,” Garrison says.

Wyman took photographs regularly into her 80s, Garrison says — recently enough that she was able to try her hand at digital and cellphone cameras. While she didn’t care for either, Garrison says, she acknowledged the luxury of not having to transport heavy photography equipment.

Sonia Handelman Meyer, Bus Stop, New York City (c. 1946-1950)

 courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Gallery owners Michelle and Sid Monroe say 1946 to 1950 was a time of great change in the U.S. in general and in New York City in particular, with an influx of immigrants integrating into an optimistic society.

“We are beginning to describe ourselves as the world’s model of democracy,” Michelle Monroe says of the U.S. at the time. “We saved Europe, we vanquished the Japanese. When you put into context what these photographers’ mission was, that directly contradicted this new description of America. ‘What do you mean, you’re the world’s model for democracy? Look at these children. Look at the conditions that they’re living in.’

“People have been incredulous, asking how these possibly could be deemed threatening. Well, let’s go back to the culture of America post-World War II. They were in direct opposition with the narrative that the McCarthy era was describing. When we explain that to people, they’re like, ‘I got it.’”

Meyer and Wyman met — but not in their Photo League days. An exhibit in New York about a decade ago featured a photograph of them embracing at a museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, says Sid Monroe.

Michelle Monroe adds, “As women, they understood that they couldn’t be pushy, because you know what would happen if you were a pushy woman back then. But they knew how to get things done on the down low, so to speak, and I think that served them well for their entire lives.” ◀

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Two Pioneering Women Photographers of the Photo League

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, through June 18

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave.

505-992-0800, info@monroegallery.com, monroegallery.com

More reading:

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 (Yale University Press, First Edition, 2011), a hardcover coffee table book by Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, features 150 photographs by Photo League members.

REMEMBERING THE RADICAL WOMEN OF NEW YORK'S PHOTO LEAGUE

 Via Huck Magazine

April 26, 2023

By Miss Rosen

A new exhibition revisits the work of Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman, who devoted themselves to social justice and chronicling daily city life as part of one of the most progressive art collectives in US history.

In 1936, a group of predominantly Jewish-American photographers in New York City came together to form The Photo League, dedicating themselves to using the camera in the ongoing fight for social change. By the ‘40s, the League’s roster included luminaries like W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, Lisette Model and Weegee, with women accounting for more than a third of their membership at a time when gender equity in the industry was extremely rare.

Standing at the vanguard of art and activism, the League was dedicated to supporting the struggles of American workers through the Depression and the start of the post-war boom – only to be targeted by the FBI during the early years of the Red Scare. In 1947, the US Department of Justice blacklisted the Photo League as a “subversive organisation,” putting members at risk of government persecution.

The League rallied but was ultimately no match for the state, which used a paid informant to destroy the photography collective in court. Although the League finally disbanded in 1951, its legacy lives on in both the work of its members and their shared commitment to human rights.

Sonia Handelman Meyer

Sharp dressers on the corner, Spanish Harlem (1946-1950) 

In a new exhibition, gallerists Sid and Michelle Monroe revisit the groundbreaking work of two photographers whose work as gone unrecognised until recent years: Ida Wyman (1926-2019) and Sonia Handelman Meyer (1920-1922).

Joe Meyer, manager of the Sonia Handelman Meyer Estate, remembers his mother as an artist and activist who first took interest in social issues as a teen. “When she joined the Photo League in her mid-20s, she found a new medium to share her radical ideals with an even broader audience,” he says.

Handelman Meyer attended rallies and participated in boycotts, devoting herself to civil rights, environmental and anti-war causes. Standing at the frontlines, she was tear gassed during protests in Washington D.C., charged by a mounted policeman in New York, and had rocks thrown at her during the 1949 Peekskill Riot.

In an artist statement written in her later years, Handelman Meyer recounted her work for the League photographing at an anti-lynching rally in Madison Square Park, at a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Yankee Stadium, and at the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, as well as chronicling daily life in New York, which she descried as “rough-edged, tender and very beautiful in its diversity.”

After the League shut down, Handelman Meyer packed up her prints and negatives and went underground for three years, fearing repercussions of her involvement. She lost track of League members, focusing her energy on raising a family and photographing nature instead.

After a series of events brought her work back into the public eye in 2007, Handelman Meyer, then 87, was finally able to receive the recognition she deserved. Charged with purpose, she picked up where she left off, passing along the mission of the Photo League to a new generation of photographers.

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Pioneering Women of the Photo League is on view April 21 – June 18, 2023, at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

International Acclaim For the Exhibition "Ida Wyman: Life with a camera"

Ida Wyman: Man looking in wastebasket, Coney Island, New York, 1945

Today, March 7, would have been Ida Wyman's 94th birthday. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926 in Malden, Massachusetts. The family soon moved to New York, where her parents ran a small grocery store in the Bronx. Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and she joined the camera club at Walton High School, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures. By the time Wyman was 16, she know that she wanted to work as a photographer.

Opportunities then were few for women photographers, but in 1943 Wyman joined Acme Newspictures as a mail room ‘boy’; pulling prints and captioning them for clients.

When the war ended, Acme's only female printer was fired so a man could have her job. Wyman set out on her own to begin free-lance work for magazines, and her first photo story was published in LOOK magazine the same year. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for LIFE magazine. She would eventually cover over 100 assignments for LIFE.

For the next several years, Wyman covered assignments for LIFE, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Parade, and many other leading publications of the time. Ida Wyman passed away in July, 2019. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world.

HUCK Magazine

The unsung photographer of the 20th century: Celebrating Ida Wyman

The Daily Mail

The best photographer you never heard of: Ida Wyman captured 1950s American street life, Hollywood glamour and the euphoria of the Allied victory over Japan - now it's all rolled into one glorious exhibition

Ida Wyman: Life with a camera continues through April 19, and selection from the exhibit will be on view in our booth #A1 during Paris Photo New York Presented by AIPAD at Pier 94 in New York, April 2-5.

IDA WYMAN, AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER, 1926 - 2019

Ida Wyman at Burbank Airport, Los Angeles, 1950.
Photograph by Simon Nathan.


Ida Wyman, an American photographer and member of the Photo League, passed away in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, Saturday, July 13, 2019. Read The New York Times obituary here.

The Forward: Ida Wyman, Trailblazing Street And Magazine Photographer, Dies At 93

Wisconsin State Journal: 'Indomitable' photojournalist Ida Wyman dies at 93

The UK Guardian: The pioneering female photographer Ida Wyman – in pictures

Photo District News: Obituary: Ida Wyman, Photographer for Life, Chronicler of America, 93

Art Daily: Monroe Gallery of Photography announced the death of photographer Ida Wyman

View a selection of  Ida's photography here.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Riga, Latvia, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926, in Malden, Massachusetts. She soon moved to New York, where her parents ran a small grocery store in the Bronx.

Always curious about people and how things work, she obtained her first camera at age fourteen and joined the Walton High School Camera Club. There she met Life magazine photographer Bernard Hoffman, who encouraged her to pursue a career in photography. She credits Hoffman for helping her become a nationally published photographer in a time when few women did this work.

She became ACME Newspictures first "girl mailroom boy." She soon was promoted to the position of printer and joined the all-male printing staff. She soon decided not to pursue work as a news photographer and instead pursued picture magazine photography. She would assign herself photographic narratives and soon sold her first story to Look magazine. When men returned from military service in 1945, Wyman lost her ACME job and started her career as a professional photographer.

In 1946, Wyman married Simon Nathan, an ACME photographer. Through the suggestion of Nathan's friend, Photo Magazine photographer Morris Engel, Wyman joined the Photo League, an influential cooperative of New York photographers who believed, in Wyman’s words, “photos could be used to effect change.”

"I considered myself a documentary photographer, and the league's philosophy of honest photography appealed to me," Wyman wrote.

Melanie Herzog, author of "Ida Wyman: Chords of Memory," stated in 2014 that Wyman’s photography is "eloquently composed and visually compelling.” She writes: “While people within their social environment are most often the focus of Wyman's photographs, she attended as well to details — architectural embellishments, commercial signs, utilitarian objects — that balance a composition, provide visual interest, and ground these images in their time and place."

In 1948, Wyman travelled across the United States and Mexico by bus. She planned the trip around assignments and places she wanted to visit. Traveling alone, she went from New York City to Mexico City, stopping at places because she liked the name and was curious to explore them.

She was selling work to Business Week, Fortune, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, and others but wanted work for Life. Under the advice of Life editor Ruth Lester, 23-year-old Ida traveled alone to Los Angeles, where fewer photographers were competing for assignments.

In Los Angeles, she became known as "the girl photographer who worked for Life magazine." She photographed a range of subjects from tea parties to rummage sales along with movies stars such as James Cagney, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Ronald Reagan, and Bonzo the chimpanzee. In 1950, she covered the famous Senate race between Helen Gahagan Douglas and Richard Nixon. From 1947 through 1951, Wyman completed nearly 100 assignments for Life.

With the absence of affordable healthcare and the birth of her first child, her career was put on hold while her husband's continued. After a decade of homemaking —- "I was a good mother...but I also was a good photographer" —- she worked as a photographer of scientific research projects at Haskins Laboratories in New York and later as chief photographer for the Department of Pathology at Columbia until 1983. She continued to work as a freelance photographer until the 1990s, when the years of carrying heavy equipment took its toll on her back, and she turned to stock photography.

In 2006, Wyman moved to Madison to be near family. In 2008, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art ran an exhibition "Individual Experience: The Photographs of Ida Wyman." This September, the Crossman Gallery at University of Wisconsin - Whitewater will present a collection of her work.

"Details of the daily life of children and adults, at work, at play, have always gripped me,” she wrote. “My lively curiosity to see and know was a strong motivator in my shooting a well as for assignments. The camera has been the door through which I entered the lives of people I met. Despite the technical wonders of photography, I believe that a single camera, coupled to heart and mind, can still reveal the beauty of our fellow humans on their daily rounds."

Wyman's work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library Photography Collection and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. The Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, New Mexico, represents Ms. Wyman.

She is survived by brother Ira (Judy) Wyman of Livingston, MT; son David (Patricia) Nathan of Birmingham, AL; daughter Nancy Nathan of Madison, WI; granddaughter Heather (Potter) Garrison and great-grandchildren Noah and Caleb Garrison of Fitchburg, WI; as well as additional family and friends lucky to know her independent, honest, inquisitive, and creative spirit. Ida is preceded in death by her parents, Rebecca and Joseph Wyman, and brother Morris Wyman. 

A graveside service was held on Tuesday, July 16th am with Rabbi Betsy Forester. In lieu of flowers memorial contributions may be sent to Beth Israel Center, 1406 Mound Street, Madison, WI 53711.




©Ida Wyman
Men of the Garment District Read of President Roosevelt's Death, NYC, 1945


The New York Times: Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93

Wisconsin State Journal: 'Indomitable' photojournalist Ida Wyman dies at 93

The UK Guardian: The pioneering female photographer Ida Wyman – in pictures

Photo District News: Obituary: Ida Wyman, Photographer for Life, Chronicler of America, 93

Art Daily: Monroe Gallery of Photography announced the death of photographer Ida Wyman


View a selection of Ida's photography here.

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade - in Day To Night

Stephen Wilkes: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Day to Night, 2013

 

 

More: Stephen Wilkes DAY TO NIGHT Photo Shoot Feature On CBS News Sunday Morning Show

 

The Stephen Wilkes Collection

 

 

STEPHEN WILKES - DAY TO NIGHT

 

 

Photograph by Hance Partners/Image Craft ©All Rights Reserved

Stephen Wilkes' acclaimed Day To Night series is featured on today's TIME LightBox, see it here.

The TIME magazine print edition features an 8 page photo essay, and the issue will be on stands tomorrow, Friday dated November 25, 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related: Stephen Wilkes Day To Night featured on CBS Sunday Morning

 

Union Square, New York: Day To Night

 

 

The most recent addition to Stephen Wilkes "Day To Night" Collection

Day to Night, Union Square NYC from Stephen Wilkes on Vimeo.

Stephen Wilkes: Day To Night Exhibition Featured in La Lettre de la Photographie

Flatiron Building, Day To Night (2010) © Stephen Wilkes

  COURTESY MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Via La Lettre de la Photographie

For more than two decades Stephen Wilkes has been widely recognized for his fine art, editorial, and commercial photography. With numerous awards and honors, as well as five major exhibitions in the last five years, Wilkes has made an impression on the world of photography. His most recent series features vibrant photographs of Times Square, Park Avenue, Coney Island, and Central Park, among other iconic New York locations, and capture, in a single frame, the transition from “Day to Night”. Using digital composites of images of the same site taken over a period of up to 15 hours, the photographs have a time-traveling quality, with the hustle and bustle in the afternoon sun giving way to the glow of city lights in darkening, cloud-streaked skies.

"Anything one can imagine one can create. Over the last several years, photographic technology has evolved to a point where anything is possible. I imagined changing time in a single photograph. I began to explore this fascination with time in a new series of photographs called: “Day to Night”. Photographing from one camera angle continuously for up to 15 hours, capturing the fleeting moments throughout the day and night. A select group of these images are then digitally blended into one photograph, capturing the changing of time within a single frame."

"Day to Night embodies a combination of my favorite things to photograph; documentary street photography melded with epic cityscapes. The work is a personal reflection of my deep love for New York. As this series has evolved, I discovered that the photographs began to highlight a form of emergent behavior within the daily life of the city. Studying the communication between pedestrians on sidewalks, cars and cabs on the street, these individual elements become a complex life form as they flow together to create the chaotic harmony that is Manhattan."

Full post and slide show here.

NOTE: Exhibition has been extended through June 24, 2012

THE PHOTO LEAGUE: VIVIAN CHERRY

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Vivian Cherry: "Ocu-Lav", Hell's Kitchen, c. 1950's.

Today's New York Times Lens Blog has another wonderful article about The New York Photo League.  Photographer Vivian Cherry is quoted in the article:

"Ms. Cherry was drawn to the Photo League because the work of its members tended to avoid the soft-focused, painterly style of the day. “I was in a fantasy world when I was a dancer,” she said. “And this was reality. And so much was going on in that period. And I wanted to be part of it.”
She was interested New York’s poorer neighborhoods. “Maybe I identified with them more,” she said. And she wanted to tell a story. She recalls the shock she felt when she came upon the scene of her 1947 photograph “Playing Lynched” (Slide 8). “The interesting thing about it was that this was in East Harlem,” she said. “And it wasn’t only black kids. They interchanged parts.”

Vivian Cherry: Game of Lynching, Harlem, 1947

Vivian Cherry was born in New York City. While performing as a dancer on Broadway and nightclubs in the early 1940s, she began working as a photographic printer in the darkroom for Underwood & Underwood, a prominent photo service to news organizations. It was here that Cherry became a talented printer. Wanting to further her interest in photography Cherry joined the Photo League, an organization formed by professional photographers in the 1930s to teach and support the art of photography. She studied with Sid Grossman. Soon Cherry was selling her photographic essays to such publications as Life, Look, Popular Photography, Sports Illustrated and Redbook. Then later, she was given assignments by Colliers, Pageant, This Week, Jubilee, Scope, and other magazines. Cherry was one of a handful of women at the time to be given assignments by such major publications. Cherry also made several short films and worked with the photographer Arnold Eagle as a still photographer on a film about Lee Strasberg and the historic drama school, the Actor’s Studio.

Over the years Cherry has traveled and photographed extensively in New York City, West Virginia, Georgia, England and Mexico. Although her photographs cover a wide range of cities, the images are universal. Through her lens she captures everyday life of the children, men and women on the streets of the world. One is hard pressed to distinguish between the old stodgy men on the sidewalks of London and the ones sitting on a bench in Washington Square park. Or to see any differences in the somber and sullied faces of the children in Hell’s Kitchen and the ones in the alleyways of England.

Likewise, the sense of weariness and forlorn gazes are not lost on the viewer when comparing the two images of the elderly woman from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia and the older women riding the Third Avenue El in New York City. It seems that no matter what street corner she is on, Vivian Cherry has the innate ability to look through her camera and produce a portrait that reflects a sense of life that is both timeless and ageless. 

In 2000 The Brooklyn Museum of Art presented a major exhibition of Vivian Cherry’s photographs. Vivian Cherry is still actively photographing, and the book “HELLUVA TOWN: Vivian Cherry's New York of the 1940s-1950s”will be published in 2007.

“These photographs are of work done over a half a century by a gifted artist who represents the countless photographers who turned us into a nation of observers who still get most of their information from imagery. This is the personal statement of the impersonal world as viewed by a "Working Street Photographer". -Barbara Head Millstein, Curator of Photographs, Brooklyn Museum of Art

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951

The Photo League students take their camera anywhere . . . they want to tell us about New York and some of the people who live there . . . there was almost a sense of desperation in the desire to convey messages of sociological import.”
Beaumont Newhall, 1948

Via The Jewish Museum
In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947



Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy,
New York, 1949

Photographing the City
Members rejected the prevailing style of modernism in order to engage the gritty realities of urban life. Leaguers focused on New York, and this meant looking closely at ordinary people. That impulse spurred the group to explore neighborhoods, street by street, camera at the ready.

The League and Its Legacy
A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where you learned about yourself. One of its leading members was Sid Grossman who pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to the medium. By its demise in 1951, the League had propelled documentary photography from factual images to more challenging ones--from bearing witness to questioning one’s own bearings in the world.

Mason Klein
Curator, The Jewish Museum, New York

Catherine Evans
Curator, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Jack Manning (American, 1920-2001)
Elks Parade, 1939, from Harlem Document, 1936–40
Gelatin silver print
10 1/16 x 13 in. (25.6 x 33 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, 2008-95
© Estate of Jack Manning


Sid Grossman (American, 1913-1955)
Coney Island, c. 1947
Gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 7/8 in. (23.8 x 20 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift, 2008-62
© Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (24.1 x 24.1 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund, 2008-90



The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 has been organized by The Jewish Museum, New York and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.

The exhibition is made possible by a major grant from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Betsy Karel.

The exhibit opens November 4, and runs through March 25, 2012 and will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

See related article here

See related slideshow here

Ida Wyman's photographs are included in the exhibition

Ruth Orkin's photographs are included in the exhibition