Hardcover with printed edges
104 pages, 72 plates
6.5 x 9 in / 165.1 x 228.6 mm
Edited and with an introduction by Gioncarlo Valentine
ISBN 978-1-942953-89-0
TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Uptown Odyssey, a new monograph by artist Gerald Cyrus, edited and with an introduction by Gioncarlo Valentine.
Uptown Odyssey gathers Gerald Cyrus's black-and-white photographs of Harlem made across the 1990s—a decade-long portrait of a neighborhood at the height of its cultural life. Cyrus arrived in New York in 1990 to attend graduate school at the School of Visual Arts, and spent the years that followed roaming the streets with his camera, attuned to the rhythms of everyday life. The work moves in a lyrical arc: from the street, with its children, families, characters and storefronts, down into the subway and that unique state of in-between, and back up again into the electric atmosphere of the nightclub, where music—the life force Harlem was so celebrated for—fills the room.
These are not documents of spectacle. Cyrus turned his lens on the people who gave Harlem its soul, finding in ordinary moments an extraordinary depth of feeling. His photographs carry the influence of Roy DeCarava and the tradition of the Kamoinge Workshop, the legendary Black photography collective of which he was a member—images that hold their subjects with care and without distance, in an era when people moved through public space with less wariness of a camera turned their way.
Central to the book is Gioncarlo Valentine's account of the year he spent with Cyrus in his Philadelphia studio, poring over silver gelatin prints and printing alongside him in his darkroom—a whole row house given over to decades of work. Many of the subway photographs collected here were placed in a box more than thirty years ago after being dismissed as too familiar. They are published for the first time in this book.
Uptown Odyssey is a long-overdue reckoning with an indisputable body of work—and an act of witness to the dazzling world Gerald Cyrus spent a decade recording.