JANET DELANEY
New York in the 80s
January 15 - March 5, 2022

Janet Delaney thought she was taking pictures of crowds. On short trips to New York City from San Francisco in the 1980s, Delaney welcomed the sense of anonymity that came from being in a bigger city, in a place where no one knew her. “In New York,” she told me, “no one really cared what I was up to. Everybody was living in their own worlds. It gave me a place to observe from. I was liberated. I could just wander around with my camera.” She was hungry for the city’s energy: its bustling streets, the way she could get lost in a crowd. 

But when we look at the pictures together, there are no crowds. Some of the emptiness may be attributed to the early hour. Delaney often took a red-eye flight and arrived when dawn was still kindling. Early risers walk past her quickly, intent on getting to the office. Others are lost in bleary reverie on the morning commute. 

As the city awakens, the lonely moments persist in Delaney’s pictures. A man eats alone in a diner. Passengers wait at the airport, each clutching their newspapers. The mirrored sunglasses of Delaney’s taxi driver are framed by his rear-view mirror. Even when people are together, they stand a little apart from the world around them. Delaney says, “I was really alone in New York and, I think, like a divining rod, the camera can lead you to say what it is you’re feeling.”

In all of these photographs, the latent energy of the city street is palpable. Even in the pictures that are void of people, it seems as if the city itself has a bustling interior life. It’s visible in the layering of new and old. Skyscrapers form a cool, silver backdrop to old brick warehouses. Delaney is divining the city’s future even as she documents its past. Colors spark, arcing through the built environment and animating the people passing by: the red of a tee-shirt, the green of a dress.

Delaney marvels at the way that private dramas are made public in the city. It is the humming copresence of these many worlds that can make a city street feel crowded. People lost in thought, sunbathing, sleeping, or enfolded in a lover’s embrace: there are millions of plays staged at once on the street, each person is a star in his own show. Delaney was once their eager audience and now, for us, their exquisite director.

— Kim Beil

Janet Delaney, Manhattan Bridge, 1987, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 30 in, Edition 1/2 + 1AP

Janet Delaney, La Guardia Place looking toward Twin Towers, 1984, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 30 in, Edition 1/2 + 1AP

Janet Delaney, Coffee and a Sandwich on Union Square, 1985, Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 20 in, Edition 2/2 + 1AP

Janet Delaney, Wall Street, 1984, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 30 in, Edition 1/2 + 1AP

Janet Delaney, Broadway-Lafayette Station, 1984, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 30 in, Edition 1/2 + 1AP

Janet Delaney, Four Children, Two Dolls, 1985, (Edition 1/2 + 1AP)

Archival Pigment Print20 x 20 in

Janet Delaney (b. 1952; Compton, California) is a photographer based in Berkeley, California. She received the 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and other numerous awards, most notably three National Endowment for the Arts Grants. Her work has been the subject of national and international group and solo exhibitions, including South of The Market, at the de Young Museum, San Francisco in 2015. Her photographs are found in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Oakland Museum of California, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas; Pilara Foundation, San Francisco; de Young Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Delaney released her third monograph in 2021, Red Eye to New York, published by MACK. Her prior books include South of Market (MACK, 2013) and Public Matters (MACK, 2018). She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and was a lecturer and professor in photography throughout the Bay Area, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute.