The 4th Street Photo Gallery is a small, densely packed storefront space on an East Village street that is also home to the experimental theater La MaMa, New York Theatre Workshop (where Rent was workshopped and performed), and the Rod Rodgers Dance Company & Studios. That East Village block has nurtured a surfeit of iconic and iconoclastic grassroots cultural production over the years; much of it emerged from the unassuming gallery at 67 East 4th Street, founded by photographer Alex Harsley. Now eighty-five years old, Harsley opened the gallery in 1973, two years after founding the nonprofit organization Minority Photographers, Inc, and he has been a mentor, confidant, supporter, and behind-the-scenes agitator for countless other photographers over the years. Dawoud Bey, Andres Serrano, Candida Alvarez, Cynthia MacAdams, and David Hammons are among the artists who have shown and collaborated with Harsley. He gave Serrano his first photography exhibition at the 4th Street Photo Gallery, well before Serrano became embroiled in the National Endowment for the Arts controversy surrounding his 1987 photograph Piss Christ. Hammons asked Harsley to be the cinematographer for his video Phat Free, which was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. All along, though, Harsley himself has been making photographs and video works—black-and-white street snapshots, celebrity portraits, experimental color work, and fast-paced, transfixing video montages.

The 4th Street space is an immersive experience; Harsley’s photographs are hung with clothespins wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, interrupted only by still cameras and equipment hanging by their straps alongside them. It’s a space that hums with the creative energy of its founder, a space in which images are produced, continually reconfigured and rearranged, a space where people are welcome and conversations flow. While Harsley and I were talking in the gallery on a hot and humid June day, several young people wandered in off the street, curious about the salon-style photographs: of Muhammad Ali; street musicians; a portrait of a pensive a young woman biting her fingernails; the curve of a Coney Island Ferris wheel. There’s Ray Charles at the piano; the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge; kids playing in the spray of an open fire hydrant on a hot day; a woman and her son waiting, maybe for a bus, the young boy’s small body draped over a pink suitcase whose color is echoed by the scarf on the woman’s straw hat—photographs all characterized by a sense of deep familiarity and warmth.

Harsley was born in Newport, South Carolina, and remembers his mother bringing him to nearby Rock Hill to have his portrait taken. It was not a small thing, having your picture taken. “My mother probably worked for two weeks and had a little left over to do that,” he says. “Getting my photograph taken—it lingered in the corner of my mind.” He wanted to understand the technical side of the medium, but also how images functioned, how they propelled the larger visual conversations taking place around him. He studied the images in LIFE,  Look, National Geographic, and the other so-called “picture magazines” of the time. When he was eleven years old, decidedly uninterested in the farming life that awaited him in South Carolina, he moved to New York City to be with his mother.

He was hanging out in Washington Square Park one afternoon when someone offered to sell him a camera for $15, and a path began to unfold before him. Harsley is primarily self-taught, though he studied for a time with Lloyd Varden, a photography consultant and professor of photographic science at Columbia University. His job as a messenger enabled him to roam around the city, taking pictures between deliveries, and his job as a photographer in the New York district attorney’s office gave him access to a darkroom where he honed his print-making skills.

Alex Harsley, "Playing in Chinatown," 1970Courtesy of the artist.

Harsley’s photographs and videos are a complicated love letter to his adopted city, a place he observes with gimlet-eyed affection. His many photographs of children are warm-hearted but also utterly unsentimental. “In each child, from very early,” writes James Agee in the preface to Helen Levitt’s 1965 book A Way of Seeing, “the germ of the death of childhood is at work.” Harsley himself knew well what it was like to grow up too fast, with adult responsibilities and an adult’s watchful gaze. The children in his photographs are more often skeptical than innocent, more likely to be wary than cute. They are, though, fully present in their own world, and they don’t seem to have much need for adults. Consider the group of children gathered around a shaved ice vendor in a photograph at the 4th Street gallery that could skew saccharine through another photographer’s camera. Nobody is smiling in Harsley’s picture—not the grizzled vendor, and not any of the six boys and girls waiting their turn, eyes on the prize in front of them, no time to pose for a picture. It’s a tender photograph, though, laced with the memory of anticipation for a small treat, an understanding that it’s a special occasion; the money one boy looks to be clutching was probably doled out sparingly, that one or two of the children might be sharing. Harsley has a deep understanding of the realities of these kids.

In The First Light From Darkness at Pioneer Works, four photographs that are hung in sequence point to Harsley’s love of gesture, movement, and bodies in motion—elements that form a throughline in his images, both still and moving. In the first, three young children furiously pedal tricycles down an empty city street. The leading child leans forward, fast-pedaling past a graffiti-tagged wall and an empty tree pit. The photograph evokes his many images of the Harlem Father’s Day Bike Race, a frequent subject of Harsley’s, who is himself a serious cyclist. These are city kids in 1970, unsupervised and free to roam. The next photograph captures two young girls in Chinatown, in white dresses and black patent-leather shoes, one leaning forward in an accidental curtsy. The subsequent photograph shows a dancer, nude except for black leggings, dipping forward in a graceful pose that echoes the bowing girl’s. In the last picture, we see five men, one caught mid-step, jacket flying, while the others watch with poise. They could be part of a choreographed dance, but it’s a moment caught on a handball court. In another sepia-toned image of a nearly empty city street, Harsley captures a boy in the lower left of the image, just as he sprints out of the frame. Harsley is drawn, again and again, to the everyday beauty of bodies in motion, a theme that continues into his color photographs and his filmmaking practice.

Alex Harsley, "Folks Harlem Father's Day Bike Race," 1980Courtesy of the artist.

In the 1990s, Harsley began experimenting with color in images such as Butoh Performer (1990) a pink-toned portrait of a twisting Butoh dancer, surrounded by smudges of green, colors brought out through Harsley’s play with processing. The Ghost (c. 1990s) is a pixelated, elongated form of a man in mid-stride, a still from David Hammons’ five-and-a-half-minute video Phat Free, in which Harsley filmed Hammons repeatedly kicking a bucket down the street. Harsley has made his own videos for years, which he drew on to create The First Light (2000 - 2020), an experimental montage of images—some found, some original—and sound.

In conversation, Harsley mentions feeling a kinship with the nineteenth-century writer, mathematician, and photographer Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the creator of (in)famous portraits of his young neighbor, Alice Liddell. The reference puzzled me at first. There’s an evident affinity between Carroll’s Alice, who fell down the rabbit hole into another world, and the self-sufficient children in Harsley’s photographs, unsupervised and on their own adventures in an unpredictable and potentially sinister world. But when I considered Harsley’s color photographs and video work, it made a different sort of sense. There are echoes, in Harsley’s video, of Carroll’s fantastical troupe of time traveling, shape-shifting characters exploring an alternate reality. “I wanted to deal with the whole idea of time, and the idea of the elegant universe,” says Harsley of his video. “At one time the universe was perfect, but it didn’t last, and then came chaos, and out of chaos came the universe that we live in. Within all of that you have dark energy and dark matter.”

It’s a description as elusive (and allusive) as the video itself, which is by turns disquieting and mesmerizing. The collage form of the piece reminded me of Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), but The First Light is trippier, more psychedelic: Harsley stretches and doubles, mirrors and morphs, the images, as if they were like Alice growing and shrinking. The ninety-three-minutes-long work is a montage of videotaped moments, some lifted from newscasts, some taken by Harsley; they feature dancers, bike races, news anchors, a rainstorm pelting a city street, the aftermath of a car crash, musicians, street scenes, and the chaos and horror of September 11. The soundtrack includes Harsley himself on piano and Moog synthesizers. The late poet, novelist, and East Village denizen John Farris reads a poem about September 11; the Rod Rodgers dance company performs a metaphorical piece about imprisonment; the police pull someone out of a car; dancers Kaori Iko and Kayoko Sako dance on the banks of the East River while the sun rises behind them; a child plays in the surf; and the planes crash into the World Trade Towers again and again. The images stretch and double kaleidoscopically, and bits of texts twirl into and out of the frame. His work embraces the dance, painting, beauty, and lyricism found on any given city sidewalk, but also the chaos and fevered anxiety that characterizes the city. The creation of an artist who has never stopped experimenting, the video is a meditation on time and on New York City. It’s also a fragmented form of autobiography. “The trajectory of the video is from the darkness into the light,” says Harsley. “It’s my history: who I am and what I’ve been through.” ♦