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Harvey Wang is an American photographer based in New York City. He has published several books of photography. He is known for his portraits and short films.
Harvey Wang was born in Queens, New York, in 1956. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Purchase College, State University of New York in 1977.[1] He visited Madison County, North Carolina to conduct research and take photographs for his honors thesis "At the Crossroads," which explored the impact of popular culture on the folk culture of the area. His photographs were subsequently shown in the exhibition At the Crossroads: Music and Photographs from Madison County, North Carolina at the Neuberger Museum at Purchase College in 1977.[2]
After graduation, he worked as a photographer for the Village Voice[3] under picture editor Fred W. McDarrah.
In the early 1980s, Wang frequented and photographed Club 57, a nightclub on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, New York City that served as a mecca for filmmakers, artists, and musicians. His photographs of Club 57 regulars included Anne Magnuson, John "Lypsinka" Epperson, Kai Eric, Tseng Kwong Chi, Dany Johnson, Charlotte Slivka, Tom Scully, Klaus Nomi, Wendy Wild, John Sex, Deb O'Nair, Keith Haring, James Chance, Pat Place, Anya Phillips, and others.[4] These photographs were included in the exhibition "Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2017.[5] He photographed the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and the East Village in New York City extensively in the 1970s and 1980s.[6] A selection of his photographs were exhibited at P.S. 1 in the New York/New Wave exhibition in New York City in 1981.[7]
In 1983 he worked with author Edward Kiersh on Where Have You Gone, Vince DiMaggio?,[8] a book about retired Major League baseball players. Subjects included Vince DiMaggio, Ernie Banks, Roger Maris, Harmon Killebrew, Gene Woodling, Harvey Haddix, Willie McCovey, Pumpsie Green, and Dusty Rhodes. Wang's photographs of these players appeared in a solo exhibition at the New York Public Library (New York City) in 1983.[9]
In 1986, Wang photographed the subjects of Victoria Balfour's book Rock Wives,[10] a collection of interviews with eighteen people who have lived with and around stars of rock and roll. Subjects included Susan Rotolo, Claudette Robinson, Angie Bowie, Ingrid Croce, Bebe Buell, and Carlene Carter.
His portraits of older New Yorkers whose occupations and ways of life were being threatened by change were published in Harvey Wang’s New York[11] in 1990, and exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 1992.[12] Subjects included Ella Baker, a civil rights activist; Eddie Day, the Cyclone rollercoaster brakeman at Coney Island, Brooklyn; Joey Faye, a burlesque comedian; Tom Rella, a gravedigger at the Bayside Cemetery in Queens; Aston Robinson, a waiter at Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn; Helen Giamanco, the longest-working employee at Horn & Hardart in New York City; Edward Robb Ellis, the writer of one of the longest diaries in the world; Editta Sherman, the “Duchess of Carnegie Hall” and portrait photographer; and Benesh Horowitz, a typesetter at The Forward.
In the early 1990s, Wang teamed up with radio producer David Isay. Over a period of several years, they traveled across the country together to interview and photograph interesting Americans. The interview excerpts and portraits were published in 1995 in Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes.[13]
Photographs drawn from Harvey Wang’s New York and Holding On were the basis for the solo exhibition Going Strong: Older Americans on the Job at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in 1995.[14][15] These portraits showed older Americans still working proudly at their lifelong professions. The show subsequently traveled as part of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) program.[16]
In 2000, Wang photographed the residents of the last remaining flophouses on New York City’s Bowery for the book Flophouse: Life on the Bowery,[17] a collaboration with radio producers David Isay and Stacy Abramson. The project culminated in an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society in 2001.[18]
In the early 2000s, Wang began to explore the craft of photography and the careers of other photographers. His short film about Milton Rogovin, Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones, won the prize for Best Documentary Short at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.[19] In the film, Wang accompanies Milton and Anne Rogovin as they shoot the final portraits in their “Quartets” series on Buffalo, New York’s Lower West Side.[20] Wang also wrote an afterword for the book Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones.[21]
Starting in 2008, Wang began to explore how photographers were affected by the momentous change in photography in the wake of the transition from film to digital methods. The book of interviews and portraits, titled From Darkroom to Daylight, was published in 2015.[22] A documentary film of the same name screened at photography festivals, museums, colleges, and other public venues.[23][24][25] Subjects included Jerome Liebling, George Tice, Elliott Erwitt, David Goldblatt, Sally Mann, Gregory Crewdson, Susan Meiselas, Eugene Richards, Steven Sasson, who built the first digital camera at Kodak, and Thomas Knoll, who alongside his brother created Photoshop.
Wang directed a feature film in 2007, The Last New Yorker, featuring Dominic Chianese, Dick Latessa, and Kathleen Chalfant.[26][27]
