Playing

Joseph Maida
Soccer Game, 2002
Chromogenic development print
2020.10.263
 

Richard Harbus
The Bronx, New York, 1994
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.189
 

Mitch Epstein
Untitled [New York], 1997
Chromogenic development print
2020.10.651


Sylvia Plachy
Baseball Plié, 1982
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.316

Sylvia Plachy came to the United States from Hungary in 1958. A former staff photographer for The Village Voice, she is currently a contributing photographer at The New Yorker. The three photographs by Plachy in this section, Fire Hydrant, Baseball Plié, and Gus and Ida, are visually complex and poetic. Although still photographs, they are lyrical and evoke the joyful movement of dance. As legendary portrait photographer Richard Avedon wrote of Plachy, “She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.”

Sylvia Plachy
Fire Hydrant, 1968
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.319

Helen Levitt
Children and Fire Hydrant, c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.245

Sylvia Plachy
Gus and Ida, 1988
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.320

Larry Fink
Studio 54, 1977
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.153

Larry Fink was born in Brooklyn in 1941. In the 1960s, he studied with noted photographer Lisette Model. This photograph from Studio 54, made in 1977 in the hedonistic heyday of the disco era, is a well know image from Fink’s series “Social Graces,” which explored social class in America by comparing two different worlds: that of urban New Yorkers of “high society” and that of rural, working-class Pennsylvanians through social events like birthday parties. Fink has described his approach to his subject in a straightforward, non-judgmental manner, “The one thing I was trained in being was non-hierarchical. I don’t have an internal class system. Who you are is who is in front of me and who I am in the same, and that’s how we have to relate to each other.”

Paul Himmel
Dog in Central Park, c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.198

Ken Heyman
Dogs’ Last Swim in Central Park Lake, New York, 1985
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.194