It takes a while to discover the solitary figure on the platform of the Smith- 9th Street Station. He is cut off from us by power cables, the platform’s edge and the railway tracks- horizontal line after horizontal line that resist our entry into the space of the picture and make the man’s loneliness complete. It is characteristic of Ford Bailey to face us square-on with barriers, closed doors, walls, fences, and to withhold a wider context. He makes no concessions to our anxiety as to place. Yet everything he shows us reminds us of human presence. We become archaeologists, connoisseurs of sequence and chance and erased intentions. What, for example, are we to make of the painted shutters in front of the Dee La Chick Unisex Beauty Salon? Or of the collaged lettering of Chino? Readings of our surroundings that we take for granted are suddenly arrested- and that moment, made conscious.

I associate this moment with the dazzling clarity of these photographs, their depth of focus, their response to the pitiless New York light. We can see everything, or so it seems, and yet everything is mysterious. The pictures themselves are extraordinarily beautiful. It is the eye of an aesthete at work in these Brooklyn yards and backstreets, and an eye that is well furnished with the schemata of painting. Rauschenberg, Johns, Newman are just some of the names that these pictures evoke. Here is Braque’s nail with it’s shadow. Here is De Hooch’s courtyard, it’s perspective uncannily subverted. There is nothing tricky about these echoes. They seem to me central to his vision, acknowledgements of how art crosses boundaries and shapes and transforms the visible. Look at how minimalist painting sets up the terms of the doorbell on Ainslie Street attuning our eye to the picture’s frontality and to the sonorities of those magnificent reds on either side of the white stripe. And then consider the force with which the picture breaks away from these terms, engaging us in the phenomenal veracity of surface textures and with the crudely painted doorbells that declare a scale that is not the scale of the image as a whole, and a perspective that cuts slowly and violently against the pictorial flatness, making the whole left side of the picture aslant and problematic.

These photographs are charged with a nameless compound of tension, wonder and melancholy. They are memorable.

Andrew Forge