from the archives
Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 12
All images from the series The Day Nixon Resigned: August 9, 1974, 1974
ALEX HARSLEY
THE PRESIDENT RESIGNS
BY LYNNE TILLMAN
Alex Harsley’s photographs hang in the window of The 4th Street Photo Gallery. Harsley opened it in 1973, two years after he had formed the nonprofit organization Minority Photographers Inc. Harsley has been photographing since he was 11, after moving to New York from South Carolina.
For years I have been stopping in front of his store window, standing and gazing at the panoply of old and new New York scenes. Inside, he was the artist who sat at the back of the small gallery, intently working at his computer, his photographs, salon-style, on the walls around him.
One afternoon, studying the photographs, I peered in- side the gallery, when Harsley suddenly looked up and beckoned me inside. Now I was up close to his decades of NYC scenes, uptown, midtown, downtown—storefronts, night clubs, musicians, parks, signs, the city during a blizzard, protest marches, ambiguous groups, strangers and friends, people looking at people or just going about their business. Harsley shot New York’s streets empty, crowded, its people amused, contemplative, sleepy, pissed off, joyous. The city in all kinds of emotional and actual weather.
Harsley’s adventurousness and curiosity inflect his striking images. A special intimacy animates his work: he’s shooting what he feels. I feel that, for instance, in his portraits of America’s brilliant musicians, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis. For the bass player in my life, David Hofstra, I bought a print of Charlie Mingus standing near his car, his bass in its cloth case, its body resting against his body. It’s a disclosure or discovery of a mostly un-photographed, but nightly event—a musician getting to or leaving a gig. Picturing the extraordinary Mingus, in transition, makes this great musician appear oh-so-human.
Alex Harsley’s project, in this issue of OSMOS, came about the morning after Nixon resigned on August 8,1974. He decided to shoot all around the city, curious to see the public’s reactions. He was able, uniquely, to show New Yorkers, literally and figuratively, in the very act of absorb- ing the news. These pictures represent that fateful event in a way I’ve never seen before—witnesses to how the political becomes personal.
