New York City's Past Still Present in Black and White

Substack

Photographer William Meyers’s new collection, Civics, has given us a photographic record of our more civilized moments in 21st-century New York City. The scenes are relatively peaceful portrayals of citizens running for office, handing out election brochures at subway stops: Here's one weary and worried candidate "working the phones," and there's a smiling African American female bus driver, and a warm-hearted school principal—this photo won my heart as did that of a losing candidate's empty headquarters the night the election was lost.

Meyers also photographs demonstrations, but he has captured seemingly non-violent moments down at Wall Street as well as those of a Black Lives Matter protest on the Upper West Side. Meyers photographs candidates in synagogues (a really beautiful one of Carolyn Maloney at the Sutton Place Synagogue—I so wished that she had won) and journalists hard at work on the street and at their desks. Volunteers engaged in Good Causes for indigent women, peaceful town hall meetings, trusted police officers on the job, a Good Samaritan aiding a victim of epilepsy in Brooklyn at a Church Avenue station.

These are stills of patriots and parks, Democrats and Republicans, churches and synagogues, statues and monuments.

I fear that such civilized behavior is profoundly under siege—or so it increasingly seems. Perhaps Meyers wanted to document our city's better moments as a tribute to what we're in danger of forgetting or losing. Although his photographs range in time from the early 21st century to 2026, his discerning camera has not memorialized subway shovings, stabbings, and staring contests, car rammings, lootings, the hallucinating homeless, ugly street encampments, strangers screaming at each other, the deranged encouragement of violent anti-Jewish demonstrations by New York City's mayor, Zohran.

Perhaps Meyers’s work is that of a transitional artist, one versed in the past—and not yet willing to let it go—and who is not willing to step into a very strange and frightening future.

Strangely enough, the choice of photographs in Civics reminded me of why I just rewatched the Oxford-based British police drama Endeavor. A recent review of this much-loved program by someone named Rhino1008 explained my abiding interest in Shaun Evans's portrayal of an Oxford-educated young man, someone who dotes on opera and classical music as well as on the classics but who nevertheless chooses to enter the rough-and-tumble "game" of being a police officer. Endeavor wants to be known as "just Morse" (his last name, his official name), and he is not a hero so much as he is a "chronicler—one eye on events, one eye on how they will be remembered.”

Here's what Rhino writes:

“He is a classicist. He understands civilizations as arcs...Empire fading. Certainties thinning. Institutions hollowing out...And crucially, he responds as a man formed by high culture rather than mass culture. Mahler’s Fifth - not as background music, but as structure. Longing, rupture, suspended resolution. Opera rather than variety hall. His tastes situate him inside a European tragic tradition that assumes fracture is inevitable. He does not expect harmony; he expects collapse delayed.”

Meyers has photographed our past or at least the still-ongoing scenes of our better, more civic-minded selves. At some level, he may know, or fear, that these moments may be passing—may actually have already passed—away from our city.

The fact that Meyers works in black and white but not in color is interesting. Perhaps he is also memorializing or honoring the way that all the great photographers of the past were once forced to work. In describing his previous collection of music and musicians in the city, I wrote:

 “I grew up with black and white photos, movies, which were then known as the ‘pictures.’ My childhood family photos are all in black and white. Although the world itself is multi-colored, images in black and white somehow still seem more authentic, more serious, more artistic, more personal than the best technicolor photos.

“I once viewed the past only in black and white, in photos by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Eve Arnold (I worked for her husband), Margaret Bourke-White, Brassai, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Mary-Ellen Mark, Gordon Parks, and James Van Der Zee.

“I haunted the Thalia and Paris movie theaters in the early nineteen sixties to travel the world through black and white films. Who can forget Bergman’s Persona, De Sica’s Two Women and The Bicycle Thief, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, and Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Jules and Jim?

Bill: Thanks for focusing on the Bright Side. Thanks for the memories.