Barbara Mensch

New York PhotographsNew York Photographs

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R O B E R T A N D E R S O N G A L L E R Y

barbara mensch new york photographs

1. View from North Window, 2009

barbar a mensch

New York PhotographsIntroduction by Bonnie Yochelson, curator

Essay by Erica Wagner

Robert Anderson Gallerynew york: 2012

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of photographs, January 12 to March 3, 2012 at

Robert Anderson Gallery24 West 57th Street, suite 503New York, New York 10019646/455-0393www.robertandersongallery.com

Further information on the artist is available at www.menschphoto.com

isbn 918-0-615-58905-3

Contents

07 Introduction by Bonnie Yochelson

17 brooklyn bridge plates 2–12

34 Essay by Erica Wagner

37 new york on foot plates 13–31

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1. Water and Dover Streets, ca. 1995

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I first got to know barbara mensch making small talk at a bus stop. Her son Jesse and my daughter Emily went to the

same elementary school, and the bus was often late. I was familiar with her photographs of the Fulton Fish Market, but we didn’t talk shop. Years later at a gallery opening, I agreed to a studio visit and saw a large body of new work that is now the subject of this exhibition. Mensch lives and works on the top floor of a pre-Civil War ware-house on Water Street, which abuts the anchorage of the Brook-lyn Bridge (figure 1). The floors are unfinished, the walls white, the furnishings spartan, and the views spectacular, especially the sur-real specter of the bridge’s gargantuan masonry and girders directly outside the north windows. When I visited, I immediately sensed that this simple, beautiful space embedded in history was the point of departure for Mensch’s photographs. A physical and emotional con-nection to the city’s material culture unifies her disparate works: her study of the fish market; her meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge; and her street photographs, which cover four boroughs. The rigorous com-positional structure of the photographs balances their lyrical beauty. Like the loft, the photographs feel epic and romantic. The Water Street loft is the temporal as well as physical determi-nant of Mensch’s life and work. Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1951, Mensch grew up in Sheepshead Bay, the daughter of Rose Wolfe and Solomon Mensch, whose own parents had emigrated from the Ukraine. Sol ran a wholesale hardware business and was a found-ing member of the New York Road Runners Club. Rose raised two daughters—Susan and Barbara—while working her way up from secretary to administrator at Kings Highway Hospital. Like many children of the baby-boom era, Barbara reacted to her secure, middle-class childhood by challenging authority and seeking a wider world. In high school, she sang anti-war songs, became enamored of Euro-pean cinema, and developed her childhood interest in drawing by

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taking weekend classes at the Brooklyn Museum School and the Art Students League and haunting the Metropolitan Museum. The stability of Mensch’s childhood was disrupted in the 1970s. Focused on becoming an artist rather than completing her educa-tion, she moved to Soho, which was emerging as the center of New York’s art community. She worked odd jobs and studied intermit-tently, completing a BFA at Hunter College in 1976. During these for-mative years, her family was fractured by illness: Rose was stricken with cancer and died in 1977 at age 57, and Sol developed Parkinson’s disease and died in 1981 at age 67. To record her mother’s final days, Mensch found she could not draw and took up the camera for the first time. A series of photographs entitled, 24 Hours Before Death, which depicted her father grieving at his wife’s bedside, was included in one of the first shows at the recently opened alternative space P.S. 1 in Long Island City. In 1979, Mensch found the Water Street loft, an experience she has beautifully described:

I located the ancient brick building and rang a makeshift door buzzer, its wires haphazardly dangling down the side of the build-ing. . . . I followed [the young man] up five flights to the top of the shaky stairwell, and he opened the door to a loft illuminated only by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. As my eyes adjusted, it was possible to discern large black circular imprints on the wooden floor, suggesting that at sometime in the building’s past, rows of barrels had stood there. The brick-walled room was musty and damp. There was also a set of broken stairs leading to the roof. Curious, I climbed up and unlatched the door. Outside, the view of the Brooklyn Bridge was astonishing. . . . From another vantage point I could see the East River, the abandoned docks under the bridge, and the sheds of the Fulton Fish Market. . . . Standing on the roof, I felt inspired by the bridge, and at peace being in such an out of the way, off the beaten path place. I knew in an instant that this was my new home.*

Mensch paid the prior tenant a nominal fixture fee in exchange for a

*Barbara G. Mensch, South Street, Columbia University Press, New York, 49–50.

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20-year lease. Living at water’s edge in raw space without the security of family, she began her adult life as a photographer. Mensch had not studied photography in school and taught her-self on the job, taking assignments, reading, and relying heavily on Kodak’s technical support line. Hired by the eminent gallery Knoedler & Company, she built a darkroom in her loft and honed her technical skills. In time she was sufficiently proficient to print for other photographers. Except for a handful of artists and the 150-year-old Fulton Fish Market, the seaport was largely deserted at the time, but real estate development was afoot. Plans to restore Schermerhorn Row and build a faux historical mall were intended to transform the area into a tourist mecca. The ancient rituals and colorful characters of the fish market and the threat posed by developers inspired Mensch to docu-ment the market (figure 2). Her outsider status, however, was made clear the moment she entered the Paris Bar one night at 4am, when it was most busy:

2. Icehouse, Bobby Neptune, 1982

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The large interior had a fluorescent lamp hanging from a rotting tin ceiling. Its glare pierced thick veneers of smoke, through which I could make out faces of the toughest-looking men I had ever seen. . . . The group sported heavy jackets; most wore pea caps or wool hats. Metal grappling hooks dangled from their worn jack-ets, and some of the men leaning over the bar wore blood-encrusted aprons. The stark overhead lighting cast intense shadows across their hardened features. Suddenly, a large man stepped forward and advanced within an inch of my face. Fixing me with an icy stare, he said, “Get the fuck out.” *

Common sense would argue against a pretty young woman with a camera earning the trust and respect of the market men, but over a four-year period, Mensch accomplished her goal, even photographing inside the Paris Bar before it closed (figure 3). To document the fish market, she used a Rolleiflex, a twin lens reflex camera with a square format negative favored by mid-century photojournalists. Sturdy and flexible, the Rollei also appealed to Mensch’s sense of history. The project required more than nerve and perseverance; it required

*South Street, 54.

3. Mikey the Bartender, Paris Bar, 1980

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research. Drawn initially to the picturesque tableau of archaic machinery and hardened faces, Mensch studied the market’s eco-nomic and political background. Her two books on the subject—The Last Waterfront, published in 1985 when the mall opened, and South Street, published in 2007 when the market moved to the Bronx—com-bine photographs, anecdotes, and contextual information to form tex-tured cultural histories (figures 4 and 5). In 1987, Mensch married filmmaker Rick Liss, and their son Jesse was soon born. Their marriage was short-lived, and by the early 1990s, Mensch assumed full responsibility for raising Jesse. With childcare and income-generating jobs filling her time, Mensch was still able to produce “Startling Development,” a four-year photographic study of her son’s growth. Motherhood had introduced her to another new world, which she sought to understand with the camera. Another decade passed before Mensch found enough free time to pursue a non-commercial project outside the home. The Brooklyn Bridge was a constant in Mensch’s life and an occa-sional photographic subject, and she often walked down Dover Street to photograph the bridge from water’s edge (plates 6 and 8). In 1999, however, her interest in the bridge became more focused when a con-struction crew began work on the bridge’s sagging roadbed. As the crew opened the huge medieval-looking doors in the anchorage to access the space below the roadbed, Mensch caught a glimpse of the bridge’s interior. After three months’ lobbying the Department of Transportation, she was granted permission to accompany the crew. Summoning the courage that had led her to the fish market, she spent the summer following the crew down a 50-foot ladder under Pearl Street into the bridge’s dangerous and dank recesses (figure 6). Within the massive structure were huge girders which had been erected in the 1960s to help support the roadbed, as well as remnants left behind by homeless people who had entered through shuttered windows. To understand why these abandoned spaces were built, Mensch researched the bridge’s history and learned that engineer John Roe-bling had intended the anchorage to be used commercially, like the recently renovated marketplace in the base of the Queensboro Bridge.*

*Barbara G. Mensch, “The Hidden Bridge,” Metropolis Magazine, May 2000, 80–83.

4. The Last Waterfront, The People of South Street, 1985

5. South Street, 2007

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Mensch’s interest in the bridge’s history led her to the Roebling family archives at Rutgers University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Reading and handling the unpublished manuscripts, she discovered the thrilling sensation of touching the past. John Roe-bling’s drawings, the Civil War journals of his son Washington Roe-bling, and the letters and journals of Washington’s wife Emily fired Mensch’s imagination and intensified her interest in the bridge. In Roebling’s Folly (The New York Tower), Mensch sought to express the spiritual quest and threat to life and limb that the bridge meant to the family (plate 9). Inspired by drawings of the bridge’s cables, she cre-ated a series of high-contrast abstractions (figures 7 and 8). The sepia-toned prints in this exhibition show the Brooklyn Bridge in its many aspects as seen from Mensch’s windows, from her roof, and from the waterfront. The prints’ brown tone gives them an anti-quated air with the feeling of nineteenth-century art clinging to them. Like Cezanne rendering Mont Sainte Victoire, Mensch harnesses the bridge’s massive size and expanse into a variety of two-dimensional arrangements. In Zen Bridge, for example, the composition is divided into half, with the full bulk of the bridge on the left miraculously bal-anced against thin air on the right (plate 5). Pier Pilings #1 and Bridge

6. Fifty-feet Under, 1999

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8. Cable Studies, 2009

7. John A. Roebling, Brooklyn Bridge—Tangent of Cable, #1056Roebling Collection # MC 4 Institute Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York

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Reflections are variations of the same view, with the camera shifted to the right and downward (plates 6 and 7). The bridge series is as much about nature as structure. The experi-ence of weather is more intense at the waterfront, where storms are especially fierce and heavy fog is commonplace. Mensch shares with Alfred Stieglitz, New York’s first great street photographer, a love of wandering the city in extreme weather. Indeed, with Flood on South Street, she may have outdone him (Plate 2). During a nor’easter that flooded her neighborhood, Mensch encased herself in bubble wrap and duct tape and, holding her camera aloft, shot two rolls of film at Peck Slip and on John Street. She found it exhilarating to walk out into fog or torrential rain and relished the technical and formal chal-lenges posed by such conditions. Bridge Lagoon (plate 10) is a tour de force, in which the expanse and support of the bridge emerge from mist to form a delicate cross on the picture plane. Although the Brooklyn Bridge and the Fulton Fish Market were just outside Mensch’s door, the two projects required very different skills. Documenting the market meant relying on her wits to develop personal relationships and learning the customs of a distinct culture. Photographing the bridge was a solitary, contemplative pursuit. It was this side of her nature that she further explored with her forays into other parts of the city. As Jesse became more independent and galler-ies began to sell her work, there were days when Mensch “didn’t have to be anywhere,” and she began to pursue ideas for new photographs. Taken in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, Mensch’s street scenes belong to her series, “New York on Foot.” The rubric is apt. Many of the images, such as Israel Orphan Asylum (plate 17) and The Party Never Stops (plate 22), were found while wandering. Oth-ers were inspired by the weather: a nor’easter sent her out to Nathan’s Famous on Coney Island (plate 26), and a heavy fog on Fulton Street inspired Klebber’s Murder, which she named for an acquaintance who was killed in a bar brawl in Brooklyn (plate 13). The news of demoli-tion motivated her to photograph other sites, such as Last Days of the Thunderbolt (plate 27) and Greenpoint Gas Tanks (plate 28)—sub-jects she associated with her Brooklyn childhood. Mensch scouted some subjects, such as the Myrtle Avenue elevated train (plate 15) and Mechanics Alley under the Manhattan Bridge (plate 18), but she made

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a point of getting off the subway several stops early to acculturate her-self to a neighborhood before photographing. Although the series evolved intuitively, Mensch’s New York has a particular character. Her images of industrial structures, dark alleys, and working class neighborhoods recall the rough years of the 1970s and early 1980s, when industry and middle class residents fled the city, and young artists like Mensch found freedom in its abandoned build-ings. Those were years when much of Manhattan felt neglected and dangerous, but rent was cheap, and the vital energies of diverse classes and ethnic groups was palpable. Mensch sees New York through the lens of her youth, which she now locates in Manhattan’s fringes and the outer boroughs. She finds humor in the ragged letters of old signs and beauty in graffiti-covered walls and boarded-up facades. Despite the romantic lyricism of her photographs, they are not nostalgic. They reflect the New York that Mensch inhabits. In her uniform of jeans, cotton shirts and work boots, she walks along the waterfront and in working class neighborhoods ready to photograph. Recently Mensch’s building received a certificate of occupancy, which conferred legal status on it. On the lot next door, a new apart-ment building has blocked Mensch’s view of the Brooklyn Bridge (Plate 12). With her son grown, renovation of the building complete, and Manhattan ever more gentrified, Mensch is now taking stock of her life. Paraphrasing Gertrude Stein’s comment on Picasso, she defines an artist’s success as the ability to “do it again.” Her three exceptional projects leave no doubt that she can do it yet again.

bonnie yochelsonNew York, December 2011

Bonnie Yochelson is an art historian and independent curator who is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. Her books include Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, The Complete WPA Project (1997); Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (2007); and Alfred Stieglitz New York (2010).

brooklyn bridge

2. Flood on South Street, 1992

3. Brooklyn Bridge with Tug and Barge, 2008

4. Roebling’s Harp, 2009

5. Zen Bridge, 2000

6. Pier Pilings #1, 1998

7. Brooklyn Bridge Reflections, 2009

8. Eternal Wave, 1998

9. Roebling’s Folly (New York Tower), 2008

10. Bridge Lagoon, 2003

11. Brooklyn Waterfront Alleyway, 2008

12. View from My Roof, 2009

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The manhattan approach of the brooklyn bridge begins to rise over the East River just outside the windows of

Barbara Mensch’s Water Street loft. At dawn, at dusk, at midnight or three a.m., there are always people, cyclists, cars and vans beginning the crossing, ending the crossing, traveling from land over water, over water to land. Looking straight ahead, there’s no sign of the Bridge’s famous towers: this is, in a sense, a view of the Bridge at its most pur-poseful, a conduit of steel and stone seen as a fragment of itself.

Such observations are prompted by spending time with Barbara Mensch—or with her photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge. Images of the Bridge are ubiquitous: as much as the Empire State Building, the Roeblings’ bridge is an icon of New York City, and a symbol, more-over, for any number of concepts—progress, modernity, urbanism—recognized all over the world. Great artists (think of Childe Hassam or Joseph Stella) have pictured the bridge; and great photographers—Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott—have framed it.

Yet Mensch’s vision of the Bridge is unique. Living in its shadow for decades, the Bridge became a presence in Mensch’s life, a charac-ter: she came to be fascinated—as I am—by its history, its construc-tion, its place in her own and others’ imagination: and that fascination shines through her remarkable images. In them, the Bridge exists in both the present and the past, as she frames the living Bridge within its history and our modern lives.

Construction of “the Great East River Bridge” was begun in 1869; it was not completed until 1883. The first industrial dynamo, the tele-phone, the phonograph, the incandescent filament lamp and the two-stroke automobile engine: all came into being during the fourteen-year span of the Bridge’s construction. It was envisioned by John Augustus Roebling, a German born titan of engineering whose sudden death at the outset of the project seemed, at the time, an ill omen: he died of tetanus—the then-deadly lockjaw—when his foot was caught in the

barbara mensch: new york photographs | 35 | 35

pier pilings in Brooklyn as a ferry came to dock. The work was con-tinued by his son, Washington Roebling, who saw the project to its triumphant completion.

This dramatic history—the younger Roebling’s health was wrecked by the strain of this work, and so his wife, the remarkable Emily War-ren Roebling, became his silent, unstinting partner in endeavour—is expressed in Barbara Mensch’s photographs. Roebling’s Harp; Roe-bling’s Folly (plates 4 and 9): these images embody both John Roe-bling’s mystical vision for his work—and he was a mystic, as well as a great engineer—and Mensch’s conception of that vision. Other images, Bridge Lagoon (plate 10) or Pier Pilings #1 (plate 6) seem to res-onate against the manner of the elder Roebling’s death, although they retain their eerie power whether or not the viewer knows the story of the bridge and its builder.

John Roebling understood that the utilitarian need not exclude the spiritual: his Gothic-arched bridge, with its elevated walkway specifi-cally designed to give the ordinary people of New York and Brooklyn not only a breath of fresh air but also, certainly, a more elevated vision of their lives, was the transcendent expression of his philosophy. Bar-bara Mensch’s images contain and expound that philosophy, as the rising sun shines through the cables of the great Bridge or as it hides behind a row of brick warehouses in a Brooklyn alleyway. Mensch understands, as its creators did, that the Bridge belongs to all of us, to each of us, as we pass beneath it or over it, as we walk or ride or run. Most particularly, it belongs to us as we look at it: and Mensch’s vision has the power to alter, and enrich, our own vision, too.

erica wagnerLondon, November 2011

Erica Wagner was born in New York and lives in London, where she is Literary Editor of The Times. Her books are Gravity, a collection of stories (1997), Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Making of Birthday Letters (2000) and a novel, Seizure (2007).

new york on foot

13. Klebber’s Murder, 1999

14. Cortlandt Alley, 2005

15. Myrtle Avenue, 2009

16. Winter in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 2010

17. Israel Orphan Asylum, 2002

18. Mechanics Alley, 2003

19. Wall Street Christmas, 2008

20. Sunday in Williamsburg, 2006

21. Pupa and Zehlem, 2010

22. The Party Never Stops, 2003

23. Midtown Kool, 2000

24. Abandoned Motel Harlem, 2008

25. Young Girl Bronx, 2009

26. Nathan’s Famous, 2000

27. Last Days of the Thunderbolt, 2000

28. Greenpoint Gas Tanks, 2002

29. Queensboro Silvercup, 2006

30. Phantom Fisherman, 2005

31. East River Gulls, 2009

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Barbara Mensch

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