VIVIAN CHERRY’S NEW YORK BY VIVIAN CHERRY

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please contact Joel Caceres, Publicity Associate, at joel@powerhousebooks.com

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Photographers Note

I want to share my city, not through the buildings, the bright lights, nor the monu-ments, but a New York City seen through the faces, the attitudes, the behaviors, the manners, and the clothing of the individuals who live and work here. As I walk around New York I see people with varying shades of skin color, different sizes and shapes bearing the richness of many cultures. If you were born here, as I was, you are a New Yorker, but if you came here to live, you belong and can call yourself a New Yorker as well. There is no prototypical New Yorker. We are vastly different, yet very similar. Every New Yorker has a story. Here is mine. I started dancing when I was five years old and when I was older I performed in Broadway shows, nightclubs, summer theater, concerts, and “on the road.” But dancing took its toll, and in the early 1940s I injured my knee so severely that I was unable to dance. Since I needed a means of support, I took a job in a darkroom. While printing, I began to wonder what sort of photographs I could give birth to. When I received a camera as a gift, I walked up and down many streets photographing. After seeing my images I was encouraged by the results.

When my knee injury healed, I was offered a job dancing in the revival of Showboat on Broadway. The show lasted for a year during which time I both danced and photographed. When the show ended, after intense reflection, I decided to become a photographer. When I was a child there were no computers, no televisions, no cellular phones, nor digital cameras. I remember when I talked on the telephone I yelled into the receiver because I thought the person on the other end would hear me better. Children played in the street. Unlike today, most men wore hats, suits with vests, white shirts, and ties, no matter whether they were going to work, looking for work, or “hanging out” in the street. Women generally wore dresses or skirts hemmed to a prescribed length. New York City today is so different from the New York in which I grew up. Children no longer play outside their house. Men and women now wear what pleases them. The city’s ethnic mix has changed, as did the style of architecture and the height of the buildings.

My aim in this book is to show current New York City through its people. I find it fascinating to watch New Yorkers’ expressions, behaviors, attitudes, and clothing as they navigate the busy streets, buses, and subways. I try to capture their uniqueness with my camera.

—Vivian Cherry, NYC 2010

for my son, Steve Schmidt,with love

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unpretentious, Vivian went where she wished and tackled the human interactions that continue to interest her artistically. She also photographed lower Manhattan’s waterfront revival with its burgeoning shops and tourist destinations.

On the street, Vivian mingled freely with her subjects, disarming them with her sincerity. With a conventional 35mm film camera, she stood at police barricades to record the Amadou Diallo demonstrators in 1999. She endeared herself to members of the decorative tattoo subculture at a Coney Island festival and other such gatherings. Her radar was constantly alert to street fairs, rich with family groups and vendors. And while traveling about town, she also monitored the continual theater of mass transportation.

Introduced a few years ago to digital photography by her son, Steve Schmidt, Vivian now wields an electronic camera with her same street photographer’s unflagging passion and determination. As a former darkroom technician, she also revels in the art of printing images. A humanist to the core, Vivian Cherry photographs the essence of the matter at hand wherever she finds it; the images in Vivian Cherry’s New York allow our hearts and minds to share her vision.

—Julia Van HaaftenCurator of Photographs, 1981–2001The New York Public Library

Introduction

As a native New Yorker and former dancer, Vivian Cherry is sensitive to the rhythm of the city and the emotions of its inhabitants. Her first book, Helluva Town (2008), presented a selection of her black and white work from the 1940s and 1950s, images that reflect her Photo League background and free-lance assignments during the golden age of magazine photography. The present volume celebrates a more current New York.

I met Vivian Cherry in 1993, long after she had taken the photographs she brought to our meeting. I was impressed with her vivid black-and-white pictures and asked to see more. Many of her fine prints subsequently entered the collection of the New York Public Library where I was then curator. Vivian’s creative energy was as impressive as her photographs. Evidence of her first career as a dancer persists in the spare elegance and deliberate grace of her demeanor. Vivian has also been a painter, collagist, filmmaker, and silversmith among other creative roles.

Soon after our first meeting, she was surprised and moved by the growing positive critical response to her early work and decided to resume photographing in black-and-white. Ever the solid documentarian, she resurrected her proven street photographer instincts and applied them anew to her beloved city. As if a half-century hadn’t elapsed, this husky-voiced, slender, white-haired woman roamed many of the locales that attracted her previously such as the neighborhoods of Harlem and East Harlem, the East Village, the Lower East Side, and the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Completely self-possessed, self-reliant, and utterly

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VIVIAN CHERRY’S NEW YORK BY VIVIAN CHERRY

Published by

This PDF of Vivian Cherry is only a preview of the entire book. To see the complete version,

please contact Joel Caceres, Publicity Associate, at joel@powerhousebooks.com