hen I look at Gerald Cyrus’s jazz photographs, I can hear the music. I can smell the stale-moldy-acid-floral scent of beer, of cigarettes on breath, of the air strained by sweat and White Diamonds perfume. I can hear the old man shouting with his arms raised, the blue-black night of a missing front tooth amplified by the shiny gold one next to it. I can feel the heat in the room, the human humidity dewing the windows in a thick fog, daring you to trace something on their misty sheets of protection. I can sense the vibration underfoot, the feet tapping and the glasses hitting countertops and the asses hitting barstools. I recognize the finger waves shaking loose, the relaxers napping up, the cigarettes dangling between cackling gapped teeth while “How Can I Ease the Pain” sizzles out from the jukebox.
Starting in 1990, Cyrus, then a thirty-three-year-old M.F.A. student at the School of Visual Arts, began consistently documenting New York City. This month, TBW Books will publish a long-awaited collection of his images from that decade, “Uptown Odyssey.” The book gathers the photographs he took of the vibrant street corners of Harlem; of the dank, boisterous subways as he went to and from class; of Harlem’s legendary jazz clubs; and of dark, soulful night scenes, pocked with buzzing street lamps and gleaming cars. In one of my favorite images in the book, taken in 1994, two girls vamp for Cyrus’s camera beside an open fire hydrant, water spewing out onto the street and wetting their legs.
In another photograph, from 1991, a mysterious figure clad in white skulks her way from the flat, flickering light of a train station into the seemingly endless night of the city. In an image from 1997, five men stand in front of a dazzling neon sign that reads “Lounge.” The picture is so vivid in its inky perfection that looking at it suggests the gravelly voice of the man standing on the far right, beneath the hair-braiding sign, as he explains how he picked up a girl thirty years ago who lived just beyond the frame. How she looked just like Sade; how he smooth-talked her inside a bodega and walked her home. These photographs are alive, electric, and damp with prosody, preserving moments of Black life that can never truly be duplicated.