After a long apprenticeship in black and white photography, Rubinfien began photographing in color in 1978. By working with a 6×7 Siciliano camera he is afforded the flexibility of a handheld camera with the clarity and resolution of the larger negative it provides. While his subjects may be the citizens and tourists of such places as Bangkok, Burma and Malaysia, Rubinfien’s images are not only records of strange or spectacular sights. They take their leverage instead, from the very activity of travel; that exceptional state of almost complete suspension between points in space and time.

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Working in poorer neighborhoods of New York, Helen Levitt has attentively watched and recorded our ongoing process of dealing with the world and ourselves. Her extraordinarily busy characters go about their business- children playing, adults gossiping, old people fondling infants. Their actions are revealed as being full of grace, humor and pathos, as though the street were a stage and its people were all dancers, mimes and orators.

For a variety of reasons, Levitt stopped photographing for over two decades. The one photographic project she did undertake, a Guggenheim grant, was stolen from her car in 1959. But during much of the fifties, she was active in film-making, as co-maker of “The Quiet One” and “In the Street”. The latter is a renowned documentary made with Janice Loeb and James Agee. Yet when Levitt did return to the neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem in the 1970’s, she went to photograph in color. Her new characters are as vital as the ones of the 1940’s, and are beautifully gestural as they lean out their windows or carry groceries home. Helen Levitt continues to live in Greenwich Village and photograph on the streets of New York.

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These investigations into Man Ray’s persona are far from devoid of weightier aesthetic notion; for beneath their engaging comedic surface they deal with the transference of identity and adventures into the realm of the irrational. The upcoming exhibition will unfortunately be the last to feature Man Ray as he passed away, at age thirteen, this past April.

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A similar exploration into the psyche of the individual is evidenced in the work of Lisette Model, a photographer whose work spans three decades, the 30’s through the 50’s. An intensely private individual, Model has fought celebrity but her images of the rich, vacationing idlers on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais brought her national acclaim. In her later work, after her move to the United States in 1938, she delved into the mystery of glamour in America, in window displays, jazz clubs and the circus.

Profoundly influenced by Sander’s work and a student of Lisette Model, Diane Arbus worked in the 1960’s with a hand-held 2¼ camera and found unsettling oddities of lifestyle and personality among “normal people” as often as she did among those defined by society as deviate. All those she photographed are poignant in their willingness to reveal themselves to the camera. Yet her portraits may be a measure of the degree to which subject and the photographer agree to risk truth and acceptance of each other.

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It is well known that in the mid ‘30’s James Agee and Walker Evans produced together LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, a remarkable account of three Alabama Tenant farmers and their families, in which Evans’ photographs served as an introduction to Agee’s text. Few know that about the same time Evans produced another series of photographs of people in New York City’s subways, and that in 1940 Agee wrote an introduction for a collection of these portraits, thus in a manner reversing the roles the two men had played in their earlier collaboration. Of these photographs John Szarkowski has written, “In 1938 and 1941 Evans made his secret series of anonymous subway riders. This collection constitutes a kind of virtuoso piece, in which the photographer knowingly sacrificed all of his basic controls except one. To make these pictures by the feeble light of the subway cars, Evans sat in what he later called the swaying sweatbox for hundreds of hours, riding to nowhere, with the lens of a Contax camera peering from between two buttons of his topcoat, and his eyes focused on the bench opposite. He had to forego the freedom to choose his angle of view, the control of precise framing, the selection of light, the free choice or direction of his subjects. All that remained was the freedom to say yes or no- to squeeze the cable release hidden in his sleeve or not. The almost absolute lack of “purely visual” interest in this series provide an appropriate setting for the astonishing individuality of Evans’ subjects and their fellow riders- an individuality not so much of their roles and stations as of their secrets.” The “rawness” of these subway pictures was a radical departure from all photographic conventions at that time and was to influence a future generation of photographers, most notably Robert Frank. The exhibition is composed entirely of vintage prints, made by Evans’ own hand. The photographs have not been seen since the Museum of Modern Art’s 1966 Exhibition, “Walker Evans’ Subway.”

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