Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah

Inaugurating a new space for the Magnum gallery and agency, “Bruce Davidson and Khalik Allah: New York” pairs the work of two photographers depicting Harlem residents and the charged realities of public space. Davidson’s vintage prints encircle Allah’s contemporary portraits, concentrated in the center of the gallery. In the ’60s, Davidson made images of Black communal life on East 100th Street: games inscribed onto the asphalt in chalk, fire escapes as gateways to the outdoors, crates on the sidewalk doubling as makeshift communal terraces. Twenty years later, he shifted from tender black-and-white to jazzy color and from convivial neighborhood vignettes to snapshots of strangers against the heavily graffitied surfaces of New York’s hurtling subway system.

Allah has cited Davidson as an influential predecessor, but their New Yorks don’t awaken the same tensions. Between 2012 and 2019, the younger photographer made the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue his nocturnal headquarters, establishing long-term relationships with its denizens, many in states of poverty, homelessness, or addiction. Within his tightly framed images, there are no localizing details, just an inky shadow world pierced by glowering lights and pervaded by cigarette smoke and city smog. Allah’s flash transforms the faces of his subjects into polychromatic mood rings: purpled cheeks and green beards captured in close-up. There’s a chill of urban necromancy to these pictures that is absent from Davidson’s images of social life. And yet both photographers document Harlem with beautiful candor, each—through their respective aesthetic and tonal choices—puncturing the moralizing narratives attached to places where underrepresented populations live.