📸For Your 👀 Only:

A Love Letter to Harlem

John Pinderhughes

Two months ago, Claire Oliver, the owner of Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem, learned that the show she had scheduled to come to her gallery was being held back at its previous location due to COVID. “I had blank walls and nothing to put on them,” said Oliver.

These blank walls turned into a gift — literally — to the community in Harlem, where the gallery moved in 2019 after 18 years in Chelsea. Oliver invited four local Harlem photographers to exhibit their work for a charity show, for which the artists would be compensated but the gallery’s portion of the proceeds would go to a community organization.

“My clients are big-hearted people, and so when they hear it's going to charity and supporting local artists, it's a win-win-win all around,” said Oliver. The show, called A Love Letter to Harlem, is on view through April 3 and will benefit the Harlem Community Relief Fund, a project sponsored by the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce that prepares and distributes 2,400 meals a day.

Oliver owns the building that the gallery resides in and lives six blocks away. “We see the food insecurity here,” she said. “The food lines at pantries, at shelters. COVID has hit Harlem hard.”

Jeffrey Henson Scales

The show includes work from veteran photographers John Pinderhughes, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and Shawn Walker. For Oliver, the triumph isn’t just the success of the show, but the success of her artists as well. “The response so far has been fantastic,” she said.

“When we started, we made a vow that we would sink or swim with our artists. We only deal with living artists, and we only sell who we represent. In this market in New York? We're a unicorn. But when we make a sale, I want that to make an impact in an artist's life. I want that money to pay bills, to help them raise their families,” she said.

“We’ve always tried to represent the underrepresented. We made a promise to always have at least 50% women artists in the gallery. We always have minority artists. We've never been a big photography gallery, but after talking to these photographers, I feel that it's something that is missing from our program.”

Shawn Walker

The show was inspired by Ruben Natal-San Miguel, who lives across the street from Oliver. He recommended Jeffrey Henson Scales, a photographer and photo editor at the New York Times who also lives in the area. Scales had worked on his project photographing a Harlem barbershop for six years. The images have really struck a chord, said Oliver, who had sold 10 of his photographs the day after the show opened.

Contributing artists Shawn Walker and John Pinderhughes were both a part of one of the most important movements in the Harlem art scene in the 1960s, the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers working together that Oliver considers the grandfathers of modern-day photography in Harlem. “When I went to Shawn's studio, it was floor-to-ceiling African masks [he is a collector.] It was like sitting in history! It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I had that feeling sitting in the studio, like, this is going to be truly amazing.”

Above all, Oliver is glad to see money going to Harlemites who need it. “It's a really tough time for artists,” she said. “Ruben is a good example — he had a solo show he'd been excited about for years, and it came and went last year without anyone ever seeing it because the gallery [where it was shown] was shut. We felt great about getting money in local artists’ pockets. But the art world has changed forever, and we've lost a lot of great galleries this year. I look forward to a time with the gallery full of visitors, seeing the spark in people's eyes, when they see something that they can't live without and decide to own it for the rest of their lives. Hopefully we'll be able to get back to normal soon.”

Ruben Natal-San Miguel

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This week, it felt like we were beginning to recover from the crash course that was the beginning of the year. If you, like me, shed literal tears of joy upon seeing the sun shining on a walk around the block this week, then this roundup of photos is for you.

As always, here are some of the best photo stories from around the internet, and what we loved from our desk.

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