The Gallery Fifty One will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2024 and 2025.
For this exhibition, the gallery worked with Paris Match, which offered them the unique opportunity to browse their photographic archives to access this exclusive work.
Jack Garofalo, gentleman reporter in Forbidden Harlem.
Jack Garofalo was so skilled at slipping in almost anywhere that he was nicknamed La Ficelle – The String. First it was into the world of reporters, where he was invited by happenstance, thanks to his friend Daniel Filipacchi, who gave him his first Leica and opened the doors to Paris Match. Jack stayed there for 40 years, leaving the magazine a treasure trove of tens of thousands of photos. But what “Kiki” did best was wind himself around the hearts of his models – from the Shah of Iran, who lent him all his armoured vehicles for one picture, to Hemingway, whose entire bar he knocked down one memorable night, his very first story. His great friend Federico Fellini, had asked him to play a paparazzo in “8½”, but Jack preferred summer games of belote with Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez. With a mixture of cunning and lightheartedness, which often enraged his bosses, his audacity could unnerve the toughest ones. One day, he took André Malraux out on the waters of India’s Ganges River. “Stop your twitching, Minister, you’re going to capsize the boat.” No-one had ever dared speak to the writer like that and Malraux exploded with laughter. “Chic et voyou,” as they say at Match – a stylish lout, a gentleman brat.
This audacity and elegance would be his keys to open the doors of Harlem in 1970, his most remarkable story. Back then, no white person dared set foot in New York’s Black neighbourhood. Once a haven for an up-and-coming African-American elite, a hope ‘ghettoised’ by poverty and discrimination. “Too dangerous,” murmured his New York friends. A challenge for the gentleman adventurer, exasperated by the prejudices that he intended to confront. Yes, he was given a rough reception but, when threatened straight out at the gate he replied to a colossus of a man – who would become his guide: “It would be better to help me than to hassle me.” With the same aplomb, he arrived unexpectedly at the headquarters of the Black Panthers, who warmed to his ways and provided him with unobtrusive protection.
Garofalo did nothing to hide the poverty, drugs and violence that reigned over the neighbourhood, but preferred to linger on the teeming political and cultural activity in this city within the city. The tense atmosphere was unwound with laughter, easy smiles and kindness, towards this stranger. Seven years later, Jack Garofalo would explore the Bronx with the same powers of observation. These two stories – written more than 50 years ago and predictably peppered with some dated thoughts for the contemporary readers, are still unquestionably modern. His humanist eye does not lie, his lens captures life rather than death. “In the raging madness of Harlem, the journey could have ended badly”, La Ficelle mused. “Fear is contagious there, and so is hatred. Less so, though, than confidence and hope.”
Jack Garofalo : Street Chronicles
February 24 – April 20, 2024
Fifty One Too
Hofstraat 2
2000 Antwerpen
T: +32-3-2338814
https://www.gallery51.com/fifty-one-too/
THE ARCHIVES OF PARIS MATCH REVEALED
Paris Match has brought us more than 70 years of passion, sensations… and legendary photos illustrating current events, turning points, and historic occasions. “Match photos” chronicle the world, in its solemnity and in its merriment. More than 70 years of stories by great correspondents reporting from the locations where the events are happening, sometimes risking their lives to convey the power of the news, in its glory and in its despair. Another reason that Paris Match photos are so emblematic is because the editors meticulously select them each day among thousands, choosing only the best: those which appeal to the emotions we wish to share with our readers. Finding just the right photo – the most iconic one, the one that will convey the most information and that will most impact the reader – has always been, and will always be, the mission of Paris Match. These thousands of carefully archived photos are kept in optimal conditions near the editorial offices like a coveted treasure: a cultural patrimony like none other in Europe.
So to share this history, to give it its due, to spread the influence of this iconographic collection – and also to support photojournalism, which has become a precarious profession –, the Paris Match Development Department creates and coordinates customised exhibitions for the general public and offers these now-legendary photos for sale.
