Historical/Biographical Note:
Robert Alexander was born in Brooklyn on the 21st of November 1943. He spent most of his early life there, eventually working as a freelance photographer and photographer's assistant from various addresses, including Remsen Street in the downtown area of the city. He studied Art History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 to 1965 (but did not graduate) and did brief stints at the New School for Social Research (film production) and at the School of Visual Arts (16mm film editing). By the early seventies, Alexander had moved to Manhattan and had begun his work as a freelance photographer, though he continued to assist other photographers for several years. He also worked as a commercial photographer, doing catalogues and advertising for jewelry and clothing manufacturers.
Alexander's early portfolio work is at first tentatively formalist, but he quickly develops a strongly realist approach to subjects. He moves from photographing everyday, domestic objects to photographing people and street scenes. Though he retained his interest in still life photography all through his photographic career, sometimes photographing single objects in obsessive detail, it is as an observer of people in motion and interacting with a changing environment that Alexander is at his best. His photographs of New York streets, people, and architecture have that combination of intense engagement with and detachment from subjects that characterizes the work of many renowned documenters of modern city life. Alexander's slides and prints of New York City during the seventies and eighties are a lively record of a city undergoing intense change and they reveal a fascination both with the ordinariness of city life and the grandeur and strangeness of the city itself. He undertook several personal projects, photographing New York cabs and shop mannequins, and, over several years, scenes of the street from his apartment on 29th street. He also documented the building of the West Side Highway and took hundreds of slides of the Manhattan skyline.
Alexander's first resumes indicate that by the early seventies he had begun to think of himself as specializing in performance photography. His work had started to appear in various publications associated with the arts and he had collaborated with Sally Banes on the book: Terpsichore in Sneakers. His black and white photographs are given a special place in the book, accompanying individual chapters and also comprising a separate section at the end of the text. The spare, often stark simplicity of the photography suggests that Alexander had understood the tension between the singularity of the dancer's body and its sometimes violent, sometimes playful interaction with other bodies and objects. The choreographers and dancers he photographed for the book and for other publications had inherited a strong dance vocabulary from the avant-garde performers and choreographers of the fifties and sixties, but they were constantly seeking to break free of some of the constraints imposed upon modern dance by that vocabulary. These attempts to redefine movement and dance are perhaps best exemplified by the development of Contact Improvisation, with its mixture of randomness, spontaneity, and carefully focused give and take between dancers. Alexander frequently photographed Steve Paxton, who was instrumental in the development of this form, as well as the other choreographers and dancers of the collaborative group: Grand Union. His photographs of them are of performers who seem at times restrained and poised and at times utterly abandoned to movement and to contact with other dancers. His strongest street photographs share this quality with his dance pictures. He seems drawn to the vulnerability of bodies in a dynamic environment, and his work conveys something of the dancer's desire both to control spaces and to be abandoned to them.
While Alexander did not achieve the broad recognition of some of his contemporaries such as Peter Moore, his work is an important contribution to the documentation of experimental dance and performance of the seventies and eighties. He photographed most of the major experimental choreographers, dancers, and performers of the period, including Stuart Sherman, Kenneth King, Simone Forti, David Gordon, Valda Setterfield, Laura Foreman, Carter Frank, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Douglass Dunn, Rudy Perez, Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and many others. He also photographed musicians and actors, such as the then emerging Tom Waits and the already famous Peter Ustinov.
By the mid-eighties Alexander was doing less and less dance photography and more photography of the city. The collection includes thousands of slides of Manhattan dating from this period, many of which reveal Alexander's interest in ordinary street scenes and people. Most, however, are of the city's skyline and monolithic architecture, and testify to the photographer's obsession with the city that he lived in all of his life and which he left only briefly as a young man. Alexander died on the 8th of October, 1989.
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Scope and Content Note
The Robert Alexander Papers are a part of the Downtown Collection at the Fales Library, New York University. The Fales Library is the primary special collections division of the NYU libraries, housing nearly 200,000 volumes of English and American literature from 1700 to the present. Strengths of the collection include the development of the English and American novel, with an emphasis on the Gothic and the Victorian novel.
The Robert Alexander Papers comprise mainly photographs, contact sheets and negatives, and slides. There is one box of personal papers, correspondence, and memorabilia, and two boxes containing other media, such as 16mm and Super 8 films and audio cassettes. The negatives and contact sheets have been kept in chronological order, as Alexander had organized them, and the prints and slides have been arranged alphabetically. There are three boxes of unprocessed material at the end of the collection.
SERIES DESCRIPTION
SERIES I: Prints
Subseries A: Dance and Performance Prints
This subseries contains 4 boxes, ordered alphabetically, of dance and performance-related photographs. Box 4 is oversize.
Subseries B: Prints for the Soho Weekly News.
This is a series of prints, arranged chronologically, of work done for the Soho Weekly News. Copies of the tearsheets from the newspaper can be found in Series IV, box 38, folder 38.
Subseries C: Celebrity and other portraits; Peter Moore photographs; chimpanzee photographs for the NYU Physician; Kodak commemorative photographs.
Amongst the photographs in this subseries are portraits of Alvin Ailey, Tom Waits, Lucinda Childs, Peter Ustinov, Peter Boyle, Laura Foreman, Ann Beckerman, and Robert Alexander. The subseries also contains several poignant photographs of laboratory chimpanzees taken for an article in the NYU Physician.
Subseries D: Portfolios and other personal work.
Boxes 7 through 11 contain prints from Alexander's portfolios. These photographs were not clearly dated by the photographer. Since the subject matter is varied and the dates uncertain the prints have been boxed in no particular order. Wherever possible however, prints that were grouped together by the photographer have been kept together in the collection. Box 11 contains oversize prints.
SERIES II: Slides
Some of the slides in the collection were arranged in sleeves by the photographer, but thousands were in labeled and unlabelled slide boxes. It was extremely difficult to detect any order in the slides and so they have been arranged alphabetically and thematically. The embossed dates on the slides seem more or less accurate but cannot be relied upon (since some slides may have been processed some time after shoots).
Subseries A: Dance and Performance.
Boxes 12 through18 are arranged alphabetically. Of special interest are several sheets of slides, in order, of Stuart Sherman's Eleventh Spectacle (Box 16).
Subseries B: Events
Slides in this subseries are arranged roughly chronologically, though dates are uncertain. Of special interest are slides of the John Lennon observance in Central Park, and those of Thelonius Monk's funeral.
Subseries C: Portraits
The box of portraits in this subseries includes shots of Alvin Ailey, Philippe Petite, Peter Ustinov, and Tom Waits.
Subseries D: Projects: 1973 - 1987, and other personal work.
These slides are arranged thematically and chronologically where possible. They comprise several ongoing projects, most of which document some aspect of life in Manhattan. Of special interest are the slides of the Alex Katz mural in the Attorney General's office. Box 25 appears to be a selection made by Alexander and the slides have been kept in the order in which he arranged them.
Subseries E: City people, 1973 - 1983
This is one box of slides, arranged more or less chronologically.
Subseries F: City scenes, 1980 - 1986
The slides span a six year period and have been arranged more or less chronologically.
Subseries G: Nature
Boxes 31 through 33 are arranged roughly chronologically.
Subseries H: Commercial work
This is one box of slides of work done for jewelry and footwear catalogues. It represents a fraction of Alexander's commercial work in this field. The remainder have been roughly processed and boxed separately.
SERIES III: Negatives and contact sheets
Alexander organized his negatives and contact sheets chronologically. This arrangement has been retained as far as possible.
SERIES IV: Printed and other materials
Subseries A: Printed material, memorabilia, correspondence, ephemera
This subseries comprises two boxes of material, one of which is oversize (box 39).
Subseries B: Other media
This subseries includes a 16mm print of Yvonne Rainer's dance "Trio A". [Research copies may not be available for these materials yet. Check with the Fales archivist.]
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Arrangement |
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| Folders are generally arranged alphabetically by subject but sometimes chronologically within each series. | ||
| The files are grouped into 4 series. | ||
Related Material at the Fales Library and Special Collections
The Judson Memorial Church Archive
Wendy Perron's "Concepts in Performance," In The Soho Weekly News (1976-78).
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There is no information about materials that are associated by provenance to the described materials that have been physically separated or removed.
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Access Restrictions
Open to researchers. Appointments are necessary for the use of manuscript and archival materials.
Use Restrictions
Collection use is subject to all copyright laws. Permission to
publish materials must be obtained in writing from the Director of Fales
Library and Special Collections. For more information, contact
Fales Library and Special Collections
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012Phone: (212) 998-2596
Fax: (212) 995-3835
Email: fales.library@nyu.edu
URL: http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/cdfa.htm
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Administrative Information
Provenance
The Robert Alexander Papers were bequeathed to the Fales Library by the estate of Ann Beckerman, Robert Alexander's second wife. The transfer of materials, which included photographic prints, contact sheets and negatives, several boxes of slides, as well as personal papers and memorabilia, took place in January 2001 with the assistance of Dan Beckerman, Ann Beckerman's brother and the executor of her estate.
Preferred Citation
Published citations should take the following form:
Identification of item, date (if known); The Robert Alexander Papers; MSS 114; box number; folder number; Fales Library and Special Collections
, New York University Libraries.
Container List
[The following section contains a detailed listing of the materials in the collection.]