By Annie Iezzi
D
ecades of black history reside in Alex Harsley’s 4th Street Photo Gallery, depicted in the master artist’s images from the 1950s to the present day. Harsley, a Southern-born New York staple, provides raw and poignant glimpses into nightlife and street scenes, along with captured moments of celebrities from Muhammad Ali to Nina Simone to Harry Belafonte. His work plays with contrasts, asking viewers to reconsider what they think they know about society. The answers often emerge in sly humor. Over the years Harsley has had a unique vantage point to document the Black experience in America. He’s survived racially-motivated brutal beatings, endured being drafted into the Army (timed well enough to miss getting sent to Vietnam, he says, but poorly enough to be stuck in Alabama during the height of Civil Rights protest-related violence), and borne witness to more riots than he can count. Yet he’s also achieved some milestones of his own, becoming the first African American photographer for the New York City District Attorney’s office in the 1950s. In 1971 Harsley founded Minority Photographers Inc., an internationally recognized nonprofit which has been responsible for cultivating some of the most innovative women artists and artists of color in recent times, including Dawoud Bey and Cynthia MacAdams. One can say with certainty that Alex’s work, and that emerging from Minority Photographers Inc., now preserved in his gallery, is the direct result of being part of specific communities, vibrant and vital to American life but hardly understood unless you’re accepted as a member. As a Black artist Harsley’s had access to a network of such semi-secret societies and recorded them in intimate portraits, conveying them both starkly and lovingly as if to tell us years later: “Don’t be afraid of the truth - that’s really the way it was.”
ISSUE # 08 / Spring 2019
9
