UPinion: Why Wakanda Matters
By AJ Sidransky (@AJSidransky) When I was a young Jewish boy in the 1960’s the world was a very different place. As my dear friend Led Black has said to me, “that was before the Jews became white.” Just some twenty years after the Holocaust, American Jews, especially Jews like me and my family—we had […]
In Memoriam: Don Hogan Charles
Don Hogan Charles was the first black photographer to be hired by The New York Times. While you may not know his name you have definitely seen his work. His most famous photograph was the iconic image of Malcolm X holding a rifle as he gazed out of the window. Besides capturing key moments and […]
A Walking Tour of Harlem’s Literary History | Vogue
by Dana Givens I didn’t always appreciate being born and raised in Harlem, New York. Growing up, I was often struck by the stereotypes and caricatures of what others thought of my home. I quickly learned I was from “that” neighborhood, that place you tell your friends not to walk around at night. I can […]
On Whole Foods, Gentrification and the Erasure of Black Harlem | The Root
BY Angela Helm Bye-bye, black Harlem, glad I knew ye. Hello, Whole Foods, I do enjoy your products, but if you can gentrify greens, what chance do we really have? I first moved to Harlem in 1998. I was a young single mother in graduate school with a 2-year-old. Harlem offered me respite, refuge and […]
04/29/17: Harlem and the Future – Preserving Culture and Sustaining Historic Character
The 1st Uptown Preservation Conference – HARLEM AND THE FUTURE: PRESERVING CULTURE & SUSTAINING HISTORIC CHARACTER IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT Saturday, April 29, 2017 – 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM City College of New York – Aronow Theatre Cost: $10 includes lunch and a walking tour. Free for students and seniors. Tickets can be reserved […]
How Alice Neel’s Sharp, Compassionate Eye Painted Harlem | The Atlantic
The artist’s portraits of neighbors, icons, and strangers show a keen and democratic attention to detail. BY LOLA ADESIOYE When, in 1938, Alice Neel decided to relocate from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem with José Negrón, a musician and her then-boyfriend, she was making a bold yet potentially career-destroying move. During the early ’30s, Neel […]
Serving Looks: Elle Comes To Harlem
Shout out to Elle for a stellar photo shoot in Harlem recently. Featuring models Amilna Estevão and Alécia Morais and styled by Samira Nasr, Elle really did their homework and represented the eternal capital of cool properly. They hit up such iconic Harlem hotspots as the Apollo Theater, The Malcolm Shabazz Market, Sylvia’s and Red […]
Alice Neel’s Love of Harlem and the Neighbors She Painted There | NY Times
By JASON FARAGO “I love you Harlem,” the American painter Alice Neel wrote in her diary around the end of World War II, and really, she loved everything in it. Neel celebrated Harlem — specifically its ethnically mixed section known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio — for “your poverty and your loves.” And what […]
A Photographer Who Made ‘Ghosts’ Visible | NY Times
By Maurice Berger It is the often oblique details in Ming Smith’s photographs that provide their most profound meaning. Consider the eerie photograph of a person walking on a Harlem street, a blur moving across the image’s surface. The street is urban and depressed; graffiti mars steel gates and a portentous crucifix-like shadow rakes across […]
Uptown Film: Black Panther pens love letter to Harlem | Salon
BY PETER COOPER “We don’t necessarily have to have something blow up in the first five minutes,” said Jamal Joseph. “We don’t necessarily have to have a laugh in the first 30 seconds in order to get an audience involved if we have a real representation, if people can see, hear and feel themselves on […]
Long-Distance Running Mates: Harlem Women Are In With Planned Parenthood | Newsweek
BY MICHELE GORMAN The title character in the movie Forrest Gump gains national attention when he embarks on a coast-to-coast running journey that lasts three years, two months, 14 days and 16 hours. “That day, for no particular reason,” Gump says in the 1994 film, “I decided to go for a little run.” Unlike the fictional character, four […]
Aserica Comes Uptown…
Hyper cool and subversive Aserica came to Harlem recently for a slick photo-shoot by Tiffany Mumford featuring Fashion Editor Tamara Raquel Jones and model Olantha. Click below to see the rest of the images. Check out: Aserica Comes Uptown…
Get Focused: En Foco is accepting submissions for its 2017 Photography Fellowship | Manhattan Times
Find your focus. En Foco, the arts organization serving supporters of photographers of color, is accepting submissions for its 2017 Photography Fellowship. The Fellowship is designed to support photographers of color who demonstrate the highest quality of work as determined by a photography panel of peers and industry professionals. Submission Deadline is Monday, February 6, 2017 at […]
The Heartbeat of Our Being, in Black and White | NY Times
By Maurice Berger The pictures accompanying Adger Cowans’ essay in a new monograph on his work are not his professional photos, but snapshots from his personal life: his childhood home, a group portrait of his mother’s relatives in their Sunday best, and Mr. Cowans cradling his godchild. These pictures affirm the importance of photography not […]
Photo Essay: The Beauty of Black Joy | Salon
BY Peter Cooper I didn’t set out to find Black Joy, rather Black Joy found me I found it in the slight upward bend of a smile The moment right before and after a breath The spark in the eye Black Joy I found it when I went back for the photo that I almost […]
Harlem’s Rich History, Inside House’s Barbershop | NY Times
By Jeffrey Henson Scales Thirty years ago, I moved to the Harlem block where I still live with my wife, Meg, and daughter, Coco. We’d come from Southern California. As an active street photographer, I spent days roaming my new neighborhood making landscapes and portraits along the avenues and parks. It was a rugged time […]
On the Streets of Harlem, a Sense of ‘Erase and Replace’ | NY Times
By Maurice Berger Dawoud Bey’s large-scale color photographs of Harlem vividly document a bustling and rapidly transforming neighborhood: a verdant Marcus Garvey Park; construction sites popping up for more luxury housing; street vendors hawking hats and used clothing; posters of black women’s hairstyles in the window of a hair weave distributor adjacent to a vacant […]
09/07/16: The National Black Theatre Presents The Alchemy of Black Joy
National Black Theatre (NBT) is kicking off its 48th Season on Wednesday, September 7, with “The Alchemy of Black Joy.” A Dramaturgical Lobby Exhibition featuring a photo exhibit by Peter Cooper that celebrates the many shades, textures and representations of joy found in the Black community. The exhibition will also include excerpts of poetry by […]
Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks’s Joint Harlem Vision | The New Yorker
By Vinson Cunningham In the summer of 1947, editors from the short-lived magazine ’47, known since its shuttering in 1948 as The Magazine of the Year, contacted Ralph Ellison—then in the thick of his seven-year labor to complete “Invisible Man”—with an idea for a photo essay on the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem. Established a […]
The End of Black Harlem | NY Times
Newcomers say gentrification is about wealth, not race. But that’s a distinction without a difference. By MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS I HAVE lived in Harlem for half my life — 30 years. I have seen it in all its complexities: a cultural nexus of black America, the landing place for Senegalese immigrants and Southern transplants, a […]
From Black-and-White Negatives, a Positive View of Harlem | NY Times
By James Estrin On Aug. 8, 1966, The New York Times ran an article about how many Harlem residents wished more white people would visit to see for themselves their community’s reality. The article, by McCandlish Phillips, detailed in an almost anthropological way the Harlem of 1966 to Times readers. “A curtain of fear, about […]
A Push to Preserve the Cultural Legacy of Harlem’s Sugar Hill | NY Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ Morning sunlight filled Karen D. Taylor’s apartment, casting a warm glow on the books and artwork lining the dining room. Here, perched high along the bluffs in Harlem’s Sugar Hill, she invoked the names of prominent African-Americans who made her imposing building, 555 Edgecombe Avenue, the address of choice decades ago: Paul […]
Harlem’s Beauty Boom | NY Times
By CRYSTAL MARTIN Maisha Stephens-Teacher opened her hair salon, Bibi, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard five years ago. “I’ve done this for 27 years,” she said. “My salon uses high-end products. Our stylists are very talented, but I couldn’t command prices commensurate with that. People would say, ‘Well, I can pay that downtown.’” But in the […]
Gordon Parks’s Harlem Argument | NY Times
By Maurice Berger Fresh from assignments at Vogue and Glamour in 1948, Gordon Parks appeared one morning at Life’s New York headquarters, determined to show his portfolio to Wilson Hicks, the magazine’s esteemed picture editor. Mr. Hicks was initially reluctant, but he warmed to Mr. Parks’s work and the story he pitched about the gang […]
