The American photographer Bettina Cirone’s pictures of New York City from the 1960s-1980s were exhibited at the Vapaakaupunki Olohuone between the 4th and the 17th of May 2024. Photos of architectural landmarks, street scenes, and celebrities, from Muhammad Ali to Salvador Dalì and Andy Warhol. It was the first exhibition entirely dedicated to Bettina Cirone and her photos of New York City.
Bettina Cirone as a photographer
Bettina Cirone (b. 1933) got her first camera when she was nine years old. It was a small $1.50 Kodak “box brownie” camera, a gift from her father. It became Cirone’s most treasured gift – after her dog. She soon learned the magic of developing photos in the darkroom her father had set up in their Brooklyn apartment.
In the 1960s, Cirone became a fashion model, working with some of the most sought-after fashion photographers, such as Philippe Halsman and Melvin (Mel) Sokolsky. Simultaneously, she started shooting pictures of her colleagues for their comp cards. She was now using a single lens 35mm Agfa Gavaert, which she had bought in Germany.
Cirone became increasingly interested in light and composition. She started taking pictures of Central Park at different seasons. In 1966, some of them were displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now Museum of Arts and Design). Her travel photos from Haiti, instead, were included in an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in 1974. She was also asked to exhibit her work at the International Center of Photography, at the time directed by Cornell Capa, Robert Capa’s brother, but Cirone was too busy shooting pictures. During her 40-year photography career, she worked in different genres: architecture, travel, fashion, and celebrity photography. Her pictures appeared in major newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times, People, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, Jet, and others. The exhibition in Helsinki was the first show entirely dedicated to Cirone and her work.
New York City, 1960-1980
The exhibition, Bettina Cirone: Aperture on New York City, 1960-1980, takes the viewer on a journey through time. The cliché of a picture being worth a thousand words becomes clear in Cirone’s photos that document a turbulent but also fertile period in the city’s history. During Mayor John Lindsay’s administration, from January 1966 to December 1973, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. Transportation, education, and racial tensions were among the city’s problems; so was garbage piling up at street corners where it remained uncollected; rats and roaches infested streets and subway tracks. Crime rates were skyrocketing, but due to lack of funding, police officers were laid off, unemployment increased, and New York became known as the City of Fear. Moreover, the Vietnam War devastated Americans, the country was homophobic, and in New York, even serving alcohol to non-heterosexuals was illegal.
Gay bars and clubs, many of them located in Greenwich Village, were run by mobsters and were routinely raided. Sex and drugs were everywhere, pimps and prostitutes hang along Third and 12th Avenues or hustled around Times Square, known for its sex shops and peep shows. At the same time, the city was an avant-garde center of creativity and activism: Salvador Dalì, whose muse Cirone was, resided and held court at St. Regis hotel on East 55th Street, where he also had his studio; the Pop Art icon Andy Warhol, Cirone’s friend, opened his studio, The Factory, as a workspace but also to host parties. New York was one of the centers for gay liberation and Black Power movements, but also background for fashion shoots, setting for films and TV series, and home for the legendary disco Studio 54, which opened its doors in 1977.
The Exhibition
In 1970, Bettina Cirone was hired by Lindsay to work in the Lower Manhattan Development City Planning Commission. During the two years that Cirone documented the development of the city, she also photographed its people, architectural landmarks, and many historically significant events. She now used Nikon and Leica. Many of the powerful still images displayed at Olohuone Gallery were taken during the 1970s. However, the exhibition starts with an image taken in 1963. It conveys the shock caused by President John F. Kennedy’s assassination: the entire nation was grieving.
Several of Cirone’s photos invite the viewer to silent contemplation. Many of the photos can be categorized as street photography, such as “Umbrella Crowd,” “A couple strolling under Brooklyn Bridge,” and “Chinatown phone booth.” Despite the decay that surrounded Cirone, her desire was to capture beauty, which is evident in the street and architectural images, many of them aesthetically stunning.
Since Bettina Cirone was competent, well-liked, and well-connected, she was showered with invitations to theater and exhibition openings, cocktail receptions, and VIP dinners; she was a regular at the hedonistic Studio 54, as were Liza Minnelli, Halston, and many others. According to the fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg – another regular at Studio 54 – in New York, they all knew how to party!
In addition to Minnelli, Dalì, and Warhol, the iconic figures featured at the exhibit include Muhammad Ali, who fought some of his most important boxing matches at Madison Square Garden but also his battles with the US government: he was drafted in 1967 but refused to join American troops in Vietnam. Cirone photographed Ali several times; the exhibit photo was taken at a fundraising event organized by Ted Kennedy in 1977. In 1973, Cirone immortalized the self-identified drag queen Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, a Puerto Rican transgender woman on the steps of City Hall at the New York Diamond Jubilee. Johnson and Rivera were on the frontlines of the Stonewall riots that erupted in June 1969. After a routine police raid of Stonewall, a Christopher Street gay bar, the crowd refused to leave and started launching stones and bricks at the police and burning cars in protest of gay discrimination. It has been hailed as the starting point of gay liberation movement in the United States. In 1970, Rivera and Johnson founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) House in East Village as a shelter for trans / LGBT youth, many of them homeless.
Another transwoman that Cirone photographed was the petite and pretty Venus Xtravaganza, also a sex worker like Johnson and Rivera. She was interviewed in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning (1990). In December 1988, she was found under the bed at the Dutchess Hotel strangled. She was only 23 years old.
Among the 31 photos exhibited in Helsinki were pictures of film and fashion shoots, of the filming of The Great Gatsby (1974) with Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway and Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker, and fashion pictures from the 1980s, a decade that introduced the first supermodels. In sum, the photographs displayed at Bettina Cirone: Aperture on New York City, 1960-1980 invited the viewer to experience a specific time and place: New York City of the 1960s-1980s.
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Sirpa Salenius, PhD., is an Associate Researcher at Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA) in Paris, France, External Affiliate at University College London Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (London, UK), and affiliated with the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu). Her monographs include An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). She is presently writing a biography of Bettina Cirone and preparing a book of Cirone’s photographs. The exhibition was curated and organized by Salenius, in collaboration with Nina Öhman and Janne Lahti, Finnish American Studies Association, and SAM-Helsinki.
