'The Title Is Apt and Not a Whit Pretentious'

I hadn’t opened my copy of Raymond Sokolov’s Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (Harper and Row, 1980) in a long time. It’s a rather skimpy biography, though the only one we have, so I hope someone, someday writes a life worthy of Liebling’s gifts. When I was a newspaper reporter he was my unacknowledged model, along with his closest friend and colleague at The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell. 

Out of Sokolov’s volume fell a clipping of a book review I had written for my newspaper, the Albany Times Union, dated December 30, 1990. An editor I knew had introduced me to the photographs of Harvey Wang, whose first book, Harvey Wang’s New York, I reviewed. Included in the volume are fifty black and white photos of New Yorkers, usually at their workplace, “from gravedigger (in a grave, shovel in hand) and news vendor to saxophone repairman and burlesque comedian,” I wrote. Here’s the Liebling connection and probably the reason I stuck the clip into the biography:

 

“The title is apt and not a whit pretentious. After studying Wang’s photographs, I can conceive of ‘Harvey Wang’s New York’ as readily as Liebling’s, Walt Whitman’s or Edith Wharton’s. It's a New York of immigrants, first- and second-generation, heavily Jewish and Italian.”

 

Wang is sympathetic to poor and working people without virtue-signaling, rabble-rousing or sentimentalizing them. I remember feeling proud reading the book, which I read as a celebration of America and her adoption of the “huddled masses.” My lede to the review looks in the other direction:

 

“I’m willing to bet a week’s salary [which wasn’t a hell of a lot, trust me] and the collected works of A.J. Liebling that Harvey Wang, a professional photographer living in New York City, never has taken a picture – at least a flattering picture – of Donald Trump, Ed Koch or Leona Helmsly.”

 

I looked up Harvey and  found he was still working as a photographer and had an exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center, where I’m a member. I sent him an email and he replied:

 

“I treasure the two reviews you wrote of my books. They were the most wonderful and credible reviews of my career! I have managed somehow to continue being a photographer and filmmaker, but after a lucrative run of directing TV commercials and making films things slowed down considerably. My wife works at the museum of modern art, and we have lived in Brooklyn all these years. we also have a second home in Catskill, New York, not far from Albany. We are loving our time upstate.”

A guy as talented and big-hearted as Harvey shouldn’t go scraping for work. He is our Liebling of the camera. Please search out his books.