Written by Matthew Gay (CC’26), Student Curatorial Assistant, Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Currently on view on the third floor of Butler Library, Streets Taken places the photographs and archival materials of Edward Schwartz from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) in conversation with new works from MFA candidate Francisco Javier Ramírez. The exhibition was curated by Melina Moe, Curator of Literature at the RBML.
Edward Schwartz was a Russian-Jewish American photojournalist who was raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He worked a variety of industrial jobs, which contributed to his interest in the photography of the Farm Security Administration and led him to join the Photo League in 1938 and become an apprentice of photographer Berenice Abbott. Schwartz served in the U.S. Navy’s SeaBees in World War II and photographed scenes in Okinawa, which are on permanent view at the Peace Memorial Research Center in Okinawa.
Schwartz specifically cites seeing Lewis Hine’s photographs of the Empire State Building workers as one of his most important inspirations. According to him, the famous Lower East Side photographs by Walker Evans were exploitative and even repulsive, while Hine treated his subjects with dignity and respect. Schwartz’s series, Around New York, contains many portraits of Lower East Siders that are captured in earnest and present their subjects as real people, not merely victims of their circumstances who could help further a political or social agenda.
In the 1950s, Schwartz pivoted toward documenting civil rights protests like those surrounding the trial of the Martinsville Seven and high-profile court cases from the McCarthy era, including the execution of the Rosenbergs. More specifically, he photographed the Rosenbergs’ two children and the crowd at Julius and Ethel’s funeral in an attempt to elicit the public’s sympathy and humanize the couple. He described the photograph of their children as a “great human document.”
Francisco Javier Ramírez’s new works inspired by Schwartz’s photography are installed on the left side of the Circulation desk. Ramírez first encountered Schwartz’s photographs and oral histories in the archives of the RBML, and he discovered that many of the political issues facing people and artists today – “genocide, hatred, repression, persecution, and ethical and economic crisis” – are what Schwartz was intent on capturing in his practice.
Ramírez’s intention with his new photographs and the accompanying publication, Ed at age 34 (printed at Ramírez’s own press), is to “play with time and memory.” He revisited the sites that Schwartz photographed, which look drastically different over 50 years later, and re-photographed them using a disposable lens that renders the locations in blurry or grainy quality. These were then printed as transparencies and taped to the front glass of the display cases to “evoke a feeling rather than a precise rendering of space.” When you look through the colored transparencies at Schwartz’s original photographs behind them, an interesting palimpsest sensation emerges, showing a radical transformation of time and space.
In addition to the transparencies, Ramírez photographed himself standing in front of (though often almost out of frame) large-format prints of Schwartz’s photographs. He also used a hand-held scanner on projected films to produce several blurred, holographic vertical scrolls. Ramírex describes these pieces as “deliberately ambivalent, but like the transparencies, they bridge the then and now, and an imagined future.” All of these altered versions of Schwartz’s photographs are installed alongside the negatives of the original photographs and printed transcriptions of Schwartz’s oral histories.
Ramírez says that “encountering Schwartz’s archive has given me a sense of hope, for Ed, for myself, and for the world, that it will all be okay in the end.”
Streets Taken is on view on the third floor of Butler Library.