125th: Time in Harlem
The works in this exhibition explore landscape with concept and raw visceral content, creating pictures that expand our visual vocabulary.
NY Art Beat
A generation apart, Diggs and Hillel see the neglected inner city in a new light: by combining the ‘immediacy of moment’ street photographers such as Henri Cartier–Bresson and Walker Evans used and the perfection of line only a large format camera can produce, the artists have created a new visual language. Their process, at once deliberate and spontaneous, reveals the same intensity of scrutiny to the Urban Landscape that Ansel Adams gave to the Rockies. Wall Street International Magazine
Photographers Isaac Diggs and Edward Hillel have created thought-provoking work…Shot in film and processed digitally, the photos capture the street with incredible precision. The range and intensity of color in the photographs draw the eye to the layers of depth in each scene…The photographs are beautiful with their many physical and metaphorical layers. Columbia Daily Spectator
Working collaboratively on film with a 4x5 field camera, this project focuses on Harlem’s 125th Street, one of America’s iconic main streets in transition, as global economic forces reconfigure the neighborhood’s physical and cultural landscape, raising issues such as race, class, gentrification, history and collective.
In the book’s introductory essay noted photography historian Vicki Goldberg writes: “Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes canee. The result is a unique photography book and exhibition that will not only expand how we see our own neighborhoods, but the world around us.”
Collaboration with Photographer Isaac Diggs
Book and Exhibition
2014