Book Event – Gerald Cyrus: Uptown Odyssey

Join us at ICP to celebrate the release of Gerald Cyrus’ monograph, Uptown Odyssey, with a conversation featuring Cyrus and artist Gioncarlo Valentine.

This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and do not include access to ICP’s galleries.

About the Book

Uptown Odyssey gathers Gerald Cyrus's black-and-white photographs of Harlem made across the 1990s——a decade-long portrait of a neighborhood at the height of its cultural life. Cyrus arrived in New York in 1990 to attend graduate school at the School of Visual Arts and spent the years that followed roaming the streets with his camera, attuned to the rhythms of everyday life. The work moves in a lyrical arc: from the street, with its children, families, characters and storefronts, down into the subway and that unique state of in-between, and back up again into the electric atmosphere of the nightclub, where music——the life force Harlem was so celebrated for——fills the room.

These are not documents of spectacle. Cyrus turned his lens on the people who gave Harlem its soul, finding in ordinary moments an extraordinary depth of feeling. His photographs carry the influence of Roy DeCarava and the tradition of the Kamoinge Workshop, the legendary Black photography collective of which he was a member——images that hold their subjects with care and without distance, in an era when people moved through public space with less wariness of a camera turned their way.

Central to the book is Gioncarlo Valentine's account of the year he spent with Cyrus in his Philadelphia studio, poring over silver gelatin prints and printing alongside him in his darkroom——a whole row house given over to decades of work. Many of the subway photographs collected here were placed in a box more than thirty years ago after being dismissed as too familiar. They are published for the first time in this book.

Uptown Odyssey is a long-overdue reckoning with an indisputable body of work——and an act of witness to the dazzling world Gerald Cyrus spent a decade recording.

About the Artists 

Gerald Cyrus was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, CA and began photographing there in 1984. His initial subjects included jazz musicians and urban street scenes, and he exhibited at several L.A.-area galleries. In 1990 he moved to New York City to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts (SVA), which he obtained in 1992. While at SVA, Cyrus interned at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and began work on "Kinship", a project focusing on African-American family life. In 1994, he started frequenting the nightclubs and lounges in Harlem and photographed the vibrant music scene in that historic neighborhood for over six years. The resulting body of work, entitled “Stormy Monday”, was published as a book in 2008. Concurrently in the 90's, Cyrus also photographed extensively on the streets of Harlem, as well as the subway. A new publication, “Uptown Odyssey” (TBW Books, 2026) incorporates these bodies of work in conjunction with his Harlem jazz images.

Gioncarlo Valentine (b. 1990) is an award-winning American photographer and writer from Baltimore City. His photographs have been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art and he has been commissioned by Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The New Yorker, and Scientific American among many others.

Image by Gerald Cyrus