William Casby, who had been enslaved, was 106 when a famous photographer asked him to sit for a photo.
May 8, 2023You’re reading the New York Today newsletter. Metropolitan Diary and local reporting, plus our new five-part series, The Housing Crunch, which runs through Nov. 26.
Good morning. Today we’ll look at a Richard Avedon photograph that traced a shameful arc in the nation’s history in a very personal way.
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Credit…The Richard Avedon Foundation, via Gagosian; Richard Avedon; William Casby, 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 into slavery, and descendants, Algiers, Louisiana, 1963
Sandra Jones remembers the day “the guy came to do the picture.”
It was March 24, 1963. She was a teenager. “The guy” was one of the world’s most famous photographers, Richard Avedon.
Avedon had seen a short article in a newspaper that said that her great-grandfather, William Casby, had been 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 enslaved in Virginia. The article said that Casby had just turned 106. Avedon decided he wanted to photograph Casby, who lived in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans.
The portrait Avedon took was stark and startling. It went into “Nothing Personal,” a book published the following year with an essay by James Baldwin, a friend of Avedon’s from their days at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
Avedon considered the portraits in “Nothing Personal” to be “some of my very best work.” As the photography historian Philip Gefter wrote in 2017, they stand as “a stark yet authentic counterpoint to the American image of eternal youth and anodyne good cheer” — the relentlessly upbeat tone that Madison Avenue, in particular, served up in the 1950s and 1960s.
Besides Casby, “Nothing Personal” included photographs of the celebrated wit Dorothy Parker, by then in her 60s and looking more sad than sardonic; the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; and Maj. Claude Eatherly, the pilot who had decided that the weather over Hiroshima was right for dropping the atomic bomb in 1945.
Now the Casby portrait is going into another book, to be published for the 100th anniversary of Avedon’s 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡. The Casby image is one of 150 Avedon photographs accompanied by brief essays.
It is also in “Avedon 100,” an exhibition at Gagosian, the gallery on West 21st Street, that also features family portraits that Avedon took at the same time — Casby flanked by several generations of descendants. More than a dozen of descendants of those descendants gathered for the opening of “Avedon 100” last week.
Jones, at 74, was the oldest. The youngest was Aiyanna Casby, who at 4 months of age was about the same age that Cherri Stamps-McCray was when she sat on Casby’s lap for the photograph in 1963.
Sandra Jones said that Casby had been a shoe repairman. “I used to go by there,” she said, and to her delight, “he’d put taps on our tennis shoes.”
Credit…Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York Times
He would talk about the Civil War era — the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, the year he turned 6 — and the aftermath, “saying it was a bad time,” Jones said. “My grandfather wanted for us things that he did not have because he grew up in that era when he was on the plantation.”
“He would talk about how hard the work was and how hard they worked,” she said, “but his hands were soft as cotton” — the crop on the plantation where he had been 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧. “That was the thing I could never get,” she said. “My grandfather’s hands were soft. I don’t know whether he was privileged to not pick as much as somebody else or something.”
His goal “for all of us was to do better than before,” she said. “The avenues were open more than when he came along. Even now, my grand𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren, they’ve got more opportunities than I had.”
Jones pointed out her mother and sisters in the photograph on the gallery wall. It is a few feet from another family portrait, Avedon’s photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with his father and his son. On the same wall is a portrait of Malcolm X, the former Nation of Islam leader.
Nearby is a portrait of Donyale Luna, the first African American model pictured in Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon took flak from William Randolph Hearst Jr., after advertisers pulled out of the magazine and, for what Avedon called “reasons of racial prejudice and the economics of the fashion business,” never photographed Luna for a fashion magazine again.
Renitta Sweet, a cousin of Sandra Jones and a great-great-granddaughter of Casby, said she had heard about him “since I was a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥.” She said she had contacted the Avedon Foundation in 2020 to ask if there were other photographs besides the portrait in “Nothing Personal.” “I knew they took more than one,” she said.
Gagosian asked 150 well-known artists, curators, musicians and writers to select an Avedon photograph for “Avedon 150” and write a paragraph about why it was important. The art dealer Peter MacGill chose the portrait of Casby. The family chose the two group photos, and Sweet, her brother Roderick Mitchell and their uncle Tyrone Casby drafted the paragraph that will go into the new book.
It says that Casby witnessed “the lies of Reconstruction, the injustices of the Jim Crow era and the infinite shortcomings of this blatantly racist country.”
“This history is not distant,” it says.
