City Gallery Photo Exhibit Brings Back Half-Anxious, Half-Liberated Feel Of 2nd Covid Summer

It’s a photograph of a couple on a beach on a hot summer day. On one level, it’s all perfectly normal, almost banal. He’s checking something on his laptop; she may or may not be nudging him with her foot. But in its form it seems almost coordinated, that the two people are dressed only in black and white, that they’ve then chosen a hot pink blanket to rest on, a bright orange bag to bring, a bright purple cup to drink from. And then it’s all framed by just sand, without a wave in sight.

“There are a whole bunch of elements there that are spectacularly lucky,” said photographer William Frucht, who took the picture in the summer of 2021 visiting the beach at Coney Island. ​“I was just walking around asking people if I could photograph them. What I wanted to avoid is when people pose for the camera. They were just lying on the blanket hanging out. The first thing they did was sit up and put their arms around one another.” He said they didn’t have to pose. ​“They just lay back down,” and he had his image.

Pink Blanket is one of several vivid images from ​“Last Summer,” a exhibition of Frucht’s recent photographs — running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Nov. 28 — that captures some of the half-anxious, half-liberated feeling of the second summer spent living under the Covid-19 pandemic. ​“By the summer of 2021, we thought sheltering in place would be behind us,” Frucht states in an accompanying text. ​“After more than a year, I thought we would escape our self-imposed net and fly free, and the summer would be one long party. It turned out to be only briefly and partially true.”

For Frucht, the relative quiet of the summer meant that he had a chance to do more photography than he might have otherwise. His practice took him to various parts of Connecticut and New York City. Believing that for many people the summer was going to be a time of escape, ​“I went to places where people were trying to capture that,” he said.

“I found very few places that were genuinely crowded,” Frucht continued — including iconically bustling places like Times Square. But he did find people managing moments of escape, whether it was a kid nestled among cows or two people having what looks like a friendly conversation at a fair. In the picture from the fair’s midway, the only real sign of the pandemic is that the woman is wearing blue latex gloves.

Formally, the summer photography meant leaning into the bursts of color that Frucht found all around him, from hues in clothing to foliage to sunlight. It was something of a departure from other photographs he’ ​“There was a time when I was using bright colors and I decided they were garish, so I pulled back and made things more muted,” Frucht said. ​“But this series, it seemed to be appropriate. For the street stuff — it’s summer, it’s very personal, and I wanted those to be bright and warm. For the landscapes, those were all in a very specific set of lighting conditions — low slanting sunlight. An hour or two before sunset, the light gets very yellow, almost buttery.”

He was drawn particularly to the western end of 125th Street in Manhattan, where it meets 12th Avenue and the Hudson River shore of the island. ​“It’s a place that, unless you live around there or visit there, is completely unknown. There are really no destinations. There’s not much to do except get on to the West Side Highway,” But it’s the West Side Highway overpass that creates a church-like space. ​“It’s completely accidental. They were building this highway and the highway had to be level” while the topography of the island wasn’t, ​“so they had to elevate it in this extreme way, and it creates this gorgeous space — and because it’s right by the river, the sun comes in, and it’s just spectacular.”

Frucht knew about it because his son used to live nearby. ​“Every time my wife and I would drive in, very often we’d drive back at dusk, and for eight years I thought ​‘I have to photograph this place.’” During the summer of 2021, he got his chance.

In the end, in photographing people a few months ago, Frucht didn’t just document escape; he found connection. ​“A lot of the pictures are collaborative,” he said, in the sense that he asked permission before taking the picture. This is a divergence from the old-school approach to street photography, which was to take pictures without the subjects’ knowledge so as to capture them acting as naturally as possible. Over time, as ethical questions about photographing people developed with the technology (and the sheer ubiquity of cameras), that approach has come under some scrutiny. It’s possible, Frucht said, that ​“your presence makes people self-conscious or hostile.” It’s also possible that the quality of the image isn’t what it could be because the photographer doesn’t have time to nail down the technical aspects of it before the scene changes.

So this summer, Frucht said, ​“I just started asking people. And it just relaxes the interaction so much.” In Mom & Daughter Coney Island, the picture captures a moment shortly after Frucht asked if he could take a photograph.

“Her mother wanted me to do it,” Frucht said, but the daughter ​“was really hesitant. What you’re seeing there is her trying to decide.” For other images, he talked to the subjects for a while. While a handful were shot the more standard way — ​“you come upon the scene and you photograph it,” Frucht said. — most of them involved the subjects’ willing participation.

“This is really the big change I’ve made that has allowed me to get a lot closer to people,” Frucht said. Looking for escape, it turned out, also meant closing some of the distance between people.

“Last Summer” runs at City Gallery 994 State St., through Nov. 28. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.