ODE TO NEW YORK: PHOTOGRAPHS BY GLORIA NIMETZ AND ROBERT MILLER 

December 17, 2021 - January 21, 2022

“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere…”

511 Gallery is pleased to present Ode to New York: Photographs by Gloria Nimetz and Robert Miller. The exhibition is 12 black and white photographs -- two entirely differing series covering two separate contemporary time periods -- of the public street life and the private domestic life of New York and New Yorkers. Though Nimetz and Miller choose and approach their subjects from almost opposite perspectives, the result is a thematic viewpoint of reflection on the strength and resilience of a city that, indeed, never sleeps… even, as in the past two years, if for sometimes painful reasons.

Gloria Nimetz’s photographs examine the quiet and private aspects of life in New York. While in her day job as a realtor, Nimetz photographed people and objects in domestic settings -- living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, lobbies, and backyard spaces of buildings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Nimetz focuses not only on interior settings and architecture but also on the objects that people have chosen to live with or have left behind – vases of flowers, chairs, toys, and pillbox hats. The rooms in which the objects reside are presented often in darkly-lit settings, which creates moods of disquiet and the feeling that we are prying in these spaces that belong to others…to strangers in our own city. There are few people in Nimetz’s work, but when they are present, their presences feel ephemeral. In The Stranger, a tall man in a dark overcoat with his arms at his side is little more than a blur of a shadow, standing at great distance from our view, with his back towards us, as he looks out a window in a modern and somewhat empty apartment living room, its furniture made only partially visible by multiple indirect sources of light. We have no idea whether the man lives in the apartment or is looking to buy it and at this moment is considering its view. Inexplicably, the figure, his actual silhouette, plus sections of the limited pieces of furniture, are somehow mirrored on one long wall of the room, taking up most of the vertical space of the image. Having no idea of who, why, or what we are seeing, we feel we are privy to a private space and moment, and that alone gives meaning and emotional impact.

Gloria Nimetz lives and works in New York City. Educated at Wheaton College and in graduate school at American University, her photographs have been widely exhibited and are included in museum collections, such as The Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as in numerous private collections. Nimetz’s approach to photography is guided by her aesthetic and her eye for visual perspective. She sets up each image beforehand, experimenting with both viewpoint and lighting before settling on framing and focus. The result is a composition of stillness that evokes emotional response to private lives made knowable.

By contrast, Robert Miller’s photography captures fast-paced moments of daily life almost entirely outdoors and on the public streets of New York City. Architecture plays a large part in every quick shot taken. In Park Avenue, a young, blond-haired woman in a fashionable striped dress is photographed from afar, as she stands on the center island of the avenue. As sharply focused as she appears –and it is a bright and sunny day – she is dwarfed by her immediate landscape -- the Atlantic Bank building’s sweeping horizontal façade of dark windows and a giant gold and stone Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture hovering over her as she waits for the light to change. This sole human figure in the image is apart from, but merged with, her urban landscape. She may be an office worker from New Jersey, but she is at this moment, a New Yorker and one of us. Even in Shoeshine (a rare indoor shot in Miller’s work) there is both intense clarity and blur, quietude and yet motion. Positioned only a few feet away from a Grand Central Station’s shoe stand, we watch the speed of a woman’s hands buffing the shoes of her customer, a man who is either reading or dozing. Beyond this action, are dense, long lines of workers at food pick-up windows or perhaps waiting to board a train or connecting subway. Because the interior architecture is vintage art deco, and in this image there is nothing contemporary that we can pick out in people’s dress or hair styles, or in the furnishings and lighting of the space, the picture is timeless, of a moment that is present but could have passed by us many years ago.

Photographs by Miller, such as Seagram Set-Back and Onlookers, display the city’s architecture, in which large corporate buildings are the backdrop for people in constant motion: There are cars being driven or parked, bikes and scooters going in every direction, walking and jay-walking pedestrians, residents, workers, shoppers, tourists -- all inhabiting at any single moment, the city’s life and space. While we can never be sure about the origins, livelihoods, or identities of the people we are seeing, it seems that at the moment Miller snaps the picture, they are New Yorkers. They can be and frequently are, from anywhere in the world, but the buildings and locations through which they move and sometimes pause – the Seagram Building and its fountains, the glass-walled Apple store’s wide, white plaza, or Bottega Veneta’s mannequined windows – become their landscape and backdrop for their lives. The pace in front of the buildings, and its energy is also unmistakably New York, and Miller’s genre is unmistakably street photography. As Robert Frank described it: He walks, he stops, he shoots, and walks on.

Robert Miller is a street photographer who was born and raised in New York City. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and since then has worked in the financial services industry in London and New York City. A student of intuitive photography, Miller’s focus is on the moments of life and motion in his immediate environment, which is the midtown streets of Manhattan’s 40s and 50s, the heart of the city’s financial and consumer marketplace. His viewpoints differ from the distant to the near-close-up, all completely determined by the paths of his lunchtime wanderings. Like street photographers of the past -- Andre Kertesz, for years a stockbroker, and William Klein and Robert Frank, both fashion magazine photographers -- Miller’s “day job” was supportive financially, and yet allowed him to take pictures during off-hours. It also impacted what he saw and how he saw it, unconsciously, and without the intent of a photojournalist or documentary photographer. His images of people in public, in their urban architectural landscape, is the instinctive narration of his own experience of his city. The Last Picture Show, in 2013, was the artist’s first solo exhibition, followed by inclusion of his work in the group show, Going Out: Photographs of People at Play, at the galleries of Gensler, Inc., the architectural and design firm headquarters in New York’s Rockefeller Center.

Together the works of Gloria Nimetz and Robert Miller celebrate and explore the different experiences in New York City. Nimetz puts in a lot of thought and planning behind her work while Miller spontaneously shoots what he sees when he sees it. Nimetz’s domestic works are of people and objects not in motion, while Miller’s work is simultaneously of movement and suspended moments of stillness. It’s the differing approaches and visions of the two artists that speak volumes of the experience of being in and of New York and somehow knowing that because of its diverseness – and not despite its diverseness – if you can make it here, you probably can make it almost anywhere.

This exhibition has been curated by Carlos Sanchez-Tata. For further information please contact 511 Gallery at 212-255-2885 or 511gallery@gmail.com