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At the opening of his show “Harlem, U.S.A.” last week at the Art Institute, photographer Dawoud Bey appeared in conversation with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author of the book Harlem Is Nowhere. They swapped notes on how Harlem had changed—the photos that AIC recently bought, wonderful portraits of neighborhood characters, were all shot in the 1970s, and Rhodes-Pitts’s book is about some time she spent there in the aughts. As they flipped through some of Bey’s photos, Rhodes-Pitts pointed out that the man in A Man on the Corner of Lenox Ave. & 125th St. could have come from any point in say, a 60-year period—nothing about his look or his clothes places him—but that in the intervening years his surroundings have changed. The building in the background was razed, she said, and the storefront behind Bey’s camera is now—what else?—a Starbucks.
