‘New City, Old Blues’ bears witness to a changing city

New York City has always been a place that has attracted photographers from every corner of the world. Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith, Lisette Model, and Walker Evans all moved here to pursue photography. The city, with its energy, movement, and constantly changing surroundings, is a draw for those trying to capture the city in all its forms.

But Andre Wagner had not originally moved to New York City to become a photographer. Rather, he came in 2011 to pursue a master’s degree in social work after attending college in Storm Lake, Iowa. After his first year of school, while living in graduate school housing in Midtown across from Central Park in 2012, he moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, after finding an apartment he could afford, not really knowing anything about the area. But his arrival coincided with significant changes in the neighborhood.

“New York is always changing, but there was something very tangible about witnessing it at the scale of everyday life. We often talk about change and gentrification through these big umbrella terms, but living somewhere makes those ideas much more specific,” Wagner explained. “You meet people who have lived there their entire lives, people with real histories and family histories rooted in a particular place. And then you begin noticing displacement not only through people leaving, but through buildings changing, businesses changing, rents changing, and the physical and social character of the neighborhood shifting around you.”

As he spent time there, he realized that he was going to photograph the neighborhood. The more he looked and saw, the more he began to think about the people who lived there long before his arrival, and what it meant for him to take photographs there. And, importantly, how his photographs might honor the place and the people who called it home.

“I don’t mean that in some lofty sense where I thought my photographs were going to stop gentrification or produce some kind of direct social change,” Wagner told me. “It was much simpler than that. I wanted to live there honestly, pay attention, and photograph honestly. To allow the camera to be a kind of mirror for what was happening in front of me.”

“I wanted to live there honestly, pay attention, and photograph honestly.”

— Andre Wagner

What Wagner saw was that while New York is described as a diverse melting pot, the social and economic structures of the city become obvious when you look. And this is where the title “New City, Old Blues” comes from. He realized they were the same structures that he had seen in Omaha, Storm Lake, and other places he had lived, just repeated around him in New York.

“You could see where Black people lived, where Latino people lived, where white people lived, where wealth accumulated and where poverty accumulated. You could see the systems people had created to sustain families, communities, and artistic lives, while also seeing how difficult the economic structure made that sustaining,” Wagner recalled. “I was living in Bushwick and witnessing gentrification in real time while simultaneously trying to figure out how to survive in New York as an artist myself. So there was this constant paradox between the mythology of the city and the reality of actually living inside it. Photography became a way for me to work through that.”

But in his work, it is more than just his neighborhood Wagner examines. He would leave his house in Bushwick and just walk to wherever his feet would take him between Brooklyn and Manhattan, photographing as he went. Eventually, after enough walking, and looking at all the photographs he had made, they began showing him what he was paying attention to in his surroundings. But photography also revealed insights into himself, and how he works and moves in the world.

“Over time, the photographs began revealing things about how I had learned to move through the world: where there was tension in my body, where I felt permission to look, where I didn’t, what I was anticipating from other people, and what kinds of negotiations were happening internally before I ever raised the camera,” Wagner said. “Seeing that has also been liberating. Photography has helped me stand more fully in my body and trust what I perceive. To photograph what I feel compelled to photograph, wherever I happen to be.”