Legendary Downtown Photographer Donates Collection to Tamiment Library

By Barbara Jester

      John Penley, legendary downtown New York photographer, was sitting at a light box in Tamiment Library in March, going through hundreds of images he has taken during nearly 30 years of living on the Lower East Side.
      “Here’s a group of shelter residents waiting in line for a bus to Albany in 1990,” he says. “Here’s a Housing Works sit-in at City Hall. This one is a protestor from Act Up being arrested for blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. And here’s one of Bill Kunstler, getting an award from the human rights group Refuse and Resist!”
      Penley has been reliving his history as an activist, often on behalf of squatters during the housing protests of the 1990s, as he painstakingly goes through the 40,000 images he has recently given to NYU’s Tamiment Library. Tamiment, located on the 10th floor of Bobst Library, is one of the country’s leading repositories of research materials in the history of leftist politics and labor and is home to an extensive collection of archives and papers from the Squatters’ Rights movement. Tamiment also has the archive of Refuse and Resist!, founded in New York in 1987 and dissolved in 2006.
      Many images in the collection show the development of the Lower East Side’s artist community during the 1980s and ’90s and reveal the way art and politics came together there. Photographs of authors William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are in the collection along with pictures of the 1988 Tompkins Square riot, in which police tried to clear the park of the homeless and 44 people were injured.
      “The archive depicts the transformation of the Lower East Side over the past 25 years from a neighborhood defined by urban decay and abandoned buildings to a vital artistic community now being gentrified and increasingly commercialized,” says Michael Nash, Tamiment Library director.
      To assist in organizing the collection, Penley has been going through the photographs, noting people, places, and events. Some of the images are black-and-white negatives but most are color slides. Tamiment is digitizing a percentage of the images in order to make them accessible to researchers. Under the terms of his agreement with NYU, Penley, 57, will keep the rights to the images during his lifetime, after which they will belong to NYU.
      Hundreds of Penley’s photographs have appeared over the years in such publications as the downtown newspapers The Villager and The Village Voice. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he spent 10 years covering the Lower East Side as a beat photographer for The New York Times, documenting protests he supported and gentrification he regretted.
      “I’ve always had these two identities, as activist and photojournalist,” Penley says. With this gift to NYU, however, he is retiring as a photojournalist. “You get beat up, you get arrested. I’m done.”