What we owe the artists who came before us

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Set us as preferred As we sit in Gerald Cyrus’ upstairs office, we snack greedily from a box of sugar-free oatmeal raisin cookies, our favorite treat when printing at the house that holds the bulk of his sprawling archive and taut darkroom in North Philadelphia.For the last two years I’ve been visiting this house, poring over box after massive box of shimmering silver gelatin prints, learning printing techniques, and editing Gerald’s debut monograph, “Uptown Odyssey,” published in October by TBW Books.I first met Gerald at the end of 2024, after coming across a Cafe Royal booklet of some of his photographs at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.

I posted about the pleasure I took in the work — the inky, jazzy perfection of these bombastic photographs — and Gerald and I struck up a conversation.He told me that he was based in Philadelphia and I was surprised because at the time I was living there too.

He invited me around for a studio visit and from there an unexpected friendship blossomed.In the photography world today — especially as it pertains to the photo book — there is a stunning lack of representation for Black photographers.Honestly, if you browse the shelves of any art book store today you would think that Black people only existed as subject matter, never as storytellers.

This kind of excision, this near total erasure of the Black voice, can turn one toward madness, certainly toward bitterness.Gerald, miraculously, is a total delight.

He’s funny, charming, excitable and curious and his love of this medium remains largely unblemished.Whether it be his joyful photographs of families in Ghana and Brazil, his pictures of sleepy passengers on his cross-country trips on the Greyhound bus, his images of his extended family down in New Orleans, or his remarkably tender portraits of his hometown of ...