Gerald Cyrus’s Magnificent Images of Black Life
When I look at Gerald Cyrus’s jazz photographs, I can hear the music. I can smell the stale-moldy-acid-floral scent of beer, of cigarettes on breath, of the air strained by sweat and White Diamonds perfume. I can hear the old man shouting with his arms raised, the blue-black night of a missing front tooth amplified by the shiny gold one next to it. I can feel the heat in the room, the human humidity dewing the windows in a thick fog, daring you to trace something on their misty sheets of protection. I can sense the vibration underfoot, the feet tapping and the glasses hitting countertops and the asses hitting barstools. I recognize the finger waves shaking loose, the relaxers napping up, the cigarettes dangling between cackling gapped teeth while “How Can I Ease the Pain” sizzles out from the jukebox.
Starting in 1990, Cyrus, then a thirty-three-year-old M.F.A. student at the School of Visual Arts, began consistently documenting New York City. This month, TBW Books will publish a long-awaited collection of his images from that decade, “Uptown Odyssey.” The book gathers the photographs he took of the vibrant street corners of Harlem; of the dank, boisterous subways as he went to and from class; of Harlem’s legendary jazz clubs; and of dark, soulful night scenes, pocked with buzzing street lamps and gleaming cars. In one of my favorite images in the book, taken in 1994, two girls vamp for Cyrus’s camera beside an open fire hydrant, water spewing out onto the street and wetting their legs. In another photograph, from 1991, a mysterious figure clad in white skulks her way from the flat, flickering light of a train station into the seemingly endless night of the city. In an image from 1997, five men stand in front of a dazzling neon sign that reads “Lounge.” The picture is so vivid in its inky perfection that looking at it suggests the gravelly voice of the man standing on the far right, beneath the hair-braiding sign, as he explains how he picked up a girl thirty years ago who lived just beyond the frame. How she looked just like Sade; how he smooth-talked her inside a bodega and walked her home. These photographs are alive, electric, and damp with prosody, preserving moments of Black life that can never truly be duplicated.
I first came across Cyrus’s photographs in 2024, when I discovered a slim booklet of his, “Harlem Nights 1990-2001,” at the Photographers’ Gallery bookshop, in London. His images of boundless, exuberant night life made me long for home, and, when I returned to my flat, I searched online for a book of Cyrus’s work, but the only thing I could find was his self-published monograph from 2008, “Stormy Monday.” I got in touch with him after posting an appreciation on Instagram; when I returned to the U.S., he invited me to visit him at his studio, in Philadelphia, where we both lived—he moved there in 2000. A few weeks later, I was inside his row house, which is devoted almost entirely to his archive. Looking at a massive shelf packed top to bottom with boxes of prints, I felt like a diabetic (which I am) salivating in front of a boulangerie (which I do). He and I carried boxes up creaky stairs to his office, where I spent days poring over prints. He showed me his darkroom, where there is a small patch of white wall adorned with postcards and flyers from friends, peers, and inspirations—Beuford Smith, Josef Koudelka, Wayne Levin, Renée Cox, Henry Taylor, Romare Bearden, and Roy DeCarava.
There has been no shortage of Black photographers committed to documenting the most intimate scenes of Black life—their family down South, the streets of Harlem, or the endless lounges, juke joints, and jazz clubs spread across the country. Tending to the quotidian, and admiring the beauty, of Black cultural life is an impulse as old as our arrival in this country. And Cyrus’s expansive body of work tells the story of a patient, collaborative observer, a frequent presence in the lives of his sitters.
Sometimes when I find myself inflating with rage about the lack of acclaim that has come to Cyrus’s œuvre, I think about how you must be able to feel his work in order to understand its depths. You need to understand the musicality and care about the lives in the images. Something I’m always noticing in the photographs that make up “Uptown Odyssey” is sweat. To understand the value of this detail, you must understand the value of seeing sweat dampening the armpits of a dark satin blouse or a musician holding a small white rag to dab the sweat away mid-performance. Sweat as exertion. Sweat as the marginalia of pleasure. Whitney Houston’s bangs drenched in sweat as she performs onstage in South Africa, the strands of hair plastered to her forehead. Baton Rouge summer sweat. Working on the chain gang or in the cotton field sweat. Just got out of the shower, dried off, got dressed, and now I’m sweating again sweat. Under-titty sweat. Under-resourced sweat. No air-conditioning sweat. Mama won’t turn on the air-conditioner even though we have one sweat. Ceiling fan ain’t moving shit around but hot air sweat. Grandma keeps opening and closing that oven sweat. Dinner’s almost ready sweat. Sweat as a through line of and a shorthand for Black life, Black discomfort, and the highest forms of Black pleasure.
Since meeting Cyrus, I’ve come to know him as a man lacking entirely in bitterness, with an almost monastically peaceful demeanor, who seems to have accepted that his photographs of forgotten places don’t hold enough value for certain people to decide that they should adorn the walls of the MOMA or the Whitney—not yet, anyway. For many years, Cyrus sent out innumerable e-mails and PDFs of his work to major publishers, but was ignored. “Uptown Odyssey” is the first time a publisher—in this case, TBW—has seen the merit in producing a monograph of his magnificent tributes to Black life. To me, his long wait for institutional recognition is infuriating. But isn’t that always the way? Aren’t we perpetually told by the powers that be that the work of our lives is irrelevant, that it doesn’t merit a second glance? Aren’t they always late to the party? Meanwhile, mediocrity splashes onto the shelves of libraries, camera shops, and bookstores like acid rain. Black life, especially the life of a Black artist, can feel like that, like an endurance test, like an endless gaslighting. Like rejection, erasure, disappearance; rinse and repeat. To acknowledge these slights—or, as Christina Sharpe has called it, “the weather”—is to play victim, to reach for our everlasting race card.
As his work shows, Cyrus’s creativity has not been stymied by his lack of recognition. With more than four decades of work, he has become, I believe, one of the most impressive photographers to ever make images. I have laughed with his images and have listened deeply to them. I’ve experienced the otherworldly sensation of holding one of his prints in my hand and feeling as though I was losing my mind, because I could hear things—jazz, R. & B., voices, shouts, murmurs, children’s laughter, the whir of a bike’s pedals, the slamming of refrigerator doors, the tiny flat sound of a far-off radio. I was holding a memory, a portal.
Can you imagine the let out, before the whites moved in and changed the weather in Harlem? Can’t you hear the drunken old men laughing, scatting, and coughing outside of St. Nick’s Pub at three in the morning, reliving their glory days of the nineteen-fifties, telling worn-out and oft made-up stories of Coltrane, Bird, and Miles, or, for the generation that followed, of Luther; Peaches & Herb; and Earth, Wind & Fire? The dizzying, even sometimes incoherent soup that is nostalgia. Can you hear it?
