Requiem to New York: Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson

Melbourne-born Ashley Gilbertson has crafted a career from his human, empathetic approach to photojournalism, most recently channelled through his images of New York City in 2020, when the metropolis was in the deepest throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gilbertson’s astute eye captured both sadness and moments of joy.

Looking back over the photographs that he made of New York in 2020 Ashley Gilbertson wrote, ‘The resulting photo essay is my requiem to the New York that we knew before the pandemic, but also a love letter to the resilient people who never gave up’.¹Ashley Gilbertson, ‘A City Ruptured’, New York Times, 21 March 2021. One of the leading photojournalists of his generation, Gilbertson has been recognised for his photographs in conflict zones, empathetic pictures of the global refugee crisis and his humanist approach to photography as a documentary medium. Born in Melbourne, Gilbertson has been based in New York City for more than twenty years, but the trajectory of his career has often taken him away from the city. One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was the shutting down of much of New York and the suspension of national and international travel. For Gilbertson, this enforced shift in his focus had a profound impact on his life and work.

Already an avid runner, his practice during 2020 involved daily distance running and, using the camera in his phone, photographing the events unfolding around him as he ran through the streets of the city. Describing his routine, he said, ‘… I’m running a lot, around 130 km a week, and I use that time to shoot. … Covering so much ground I see how neighbourhoods manage and change as the disaster unfolds’.²Ashley Gilbertson in correspondence held on file at the NGV. Despite his many years of experience as a photojournalist working in conflict zones and settings of heightened tension, photographing his own community in crisis presented unforeseen challenges for Gilbertson. In the middle of the pandemic in 2020, he wrote: Trying ‘to approach this coverage as I’m stuck in my own adopted city, unable to actually work out in the world I’m so accustomed to. I committed early on to spend the entire year in New York in order to get deep into the weeds of a ravaged city, all the weaknesses laid bare by the virus’.³Ibid.

For the NGV, Gilbertson edited his extensive collection of images to a few hundred, and then together we made a final selection of twenty-four photographs for the Collection. Discussing this process, he wrote, ‘I made the edit quite swiftly over two days, shooting in between. I found it quite moving – it’s the first time I’ve looked back at the year’s work. And you are spot on – it is the story of a city, shot in the only way that cities can be understood – through the eyes of a resident. The bus driver’s New York is different from my son’s New York which is different from my neighbours New York. What I’ve presented is my New York, and I am certain that these feelings, these scenes, are replicated throughout the world, on a daily basis, as actions, and as emotions’.⁴Ibid. Gilbertson has referred to this body of work as a portrait of New York. Many of the photographs were posted on Instagram over the course of the year, accompanied by captions written by the artist. These visually powerful images, when seen together with the artist’s writing, have a diary-like quality, telling the story of an individual, a city and a country.

Gilbertson’s photographs enable us to track a course through the pandemic as he experienced it in New York. One of the earliest images in the group shows three small girls, dressed for a party, looking out a window. On 10 March, Gilbertson went to a neighbourhood event in Brooklyn; his notes for the day read, ‘Went to a Purim celebration in Borough Park, streets packed, and the Hassidic community officials are concerned, and being there so was I. So, I hopped out of the car for just a moment and made a photo of three girls in a window, watching the party. They disappeared after that one frame – but it was a photograph of all of us – walking this safety line with zero information or honest guidance’.⁵Ibid. Two days later all events for more than 500 people were cancelled and Broadway was shut down.

Following the declaration of a state of emergency and the imposition of stay-at-home orders in mid –March, the familiar bustling activity on the streets of New York came to a halt. Many of Gilbertson’s photographs of abandoned sites have an eerie, post-apocalyptic quality. Other images, made as he ran through the unnaturally empty streets and entered deserted buildings, have a melancholy beauty, but Gilbertson’s captions bristle with rage. On 22 April, when he photographed this empty scene on the Lower East Side, Gilbertson posted, ‘Officials here tell us numbers of death have plateaued, but none can say how long this is our daily reality. New York’s an incredible city, one of many gorgeous and grand spaces across a country filled with so many good people. So why … did it take a crisis to show so many residents that right beneath all that beauty was a rotten core, devoid of ethical leadership or systems that support citizens. We’ve been failed, and we failed ourselves’.⁶Ashley Gilbertson, caption accompanying Instagram post on 22 April 2020. Scenes of despair continued into September, by which time the death toll in New York had passed 23,000. The everyday continued to be made strange, and familiar sites in the city, such as Grand Central Terminal and Lexington Avenue, did not offer the opportunities of the past – instead they had become unexpectedly contemplative spaces as Gilbertson wrote on 31 September, ‘Midtown, something new every time. Went to Grand Central expecting a rush but it is so quiet. I stood and watched as people moved through, their footsteps echoing in that cavernous space. I found a huge steam pipe busted on Lexington Avenue and it made me see how the virus might move as droplets in the air. As I worked the corner a mum and her kid stopped and stared – I wondered if they were thinking the same as me’.⁷Ashley Gilbertson in correspondence held on file at the NGV.

Despite human frailty and cruelty, systemic inadequacies, and the expanding gulf between rich and poor, Gilbertson continued to celebrate those moments of beauty and generosity that he encountered. On 26 May, he met a woman, Alexa Aviles, at an informal memorial site that had been established in Brooklyn. His entry for that day reads, ‘Saw a beautiful community made memorial outside the cemetery. One sheet was made out of the number of losses of a single nursing home here – the number 55 written carefully inside a love heart’.⁸Ashley Gilbertson in correspondence held on file at the NGV. By late May Aviles had lost four family members to the pandemic, but through this small act of resistance, establishing and maintaining this monument, she was able to honour the lives lost and stand together with her community.

Evidence of resistance was also present in small, unexpected acts of joy typified in Gilbertson’s photograph of two people lost in the moment, his notes on 12 October describe the scene as he made his way across the Brooklyn Bridge: ‘Ascending, I was thinking about the work, questioning if I was being too heavy handed, and wondering where I would find more resilience and more hope – for that is here, without a doubt. Cresting the structure, by the pylon on the Manhattan side, I found a couple. A Venezuelan/American artist and an Opera Singer. And they’re dancing, beautifully. I stopped, mesmerised and shot some frames. Almost moved to tears by how lost they are in one another’s arms, in the moment … And I ride down the bridge, so in love with New York again I feel almost sick. This city is magic. I love it here’.⁹Ibid.

This article was originally published in NGV Magazine Issue 32 Jan-Feb 2022

Susan van Wyk is NGV Senior Curator, Photography. The NGV acknowledges the NGV Foundation for supporting the acquisition of twelve photographic works from Ashley Gilbertson’s 2020 Untitled series, and warmly thanks the artist for generously gifting twelve works from the series. The full suite of twenty-four photographs will be on display at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia from April 2022.

Notes