Robert Alexander (photographer)

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, testifying 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.

Robert Alexander was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, on the November 21, 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. Alexander studied Art History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 to 1965 (but did not graduate), and conducted brief stints at both the New School for Social Research (film production) and 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; although he continued to assist other photographers for several years. He also worked as a commercial photographer, contributing to 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 documentary artists 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.