Around Lander Street — N.B. MacNamara

Broadway Meat

Amidst the urban decay of the late 20th century the photographs in “Around Lander Street” were created to deﬁne the cultural horizon of the people living in Newburgh, NY.

First Nation people called it “ land of the long reach”. The German Palatines called it ”Neuburg” (1709). Since then its history details over 300 years of cultural bombardment. Waves of disparate people came to live in the traces others had left behind.

Normal cultural assimilation was not apparent in the inner city as the notion of “otherness” existed to deﬁne the psychogeographic region where both colonizers and colonized were living in the margins of capitalism, and joined together by the conjunctiveness of abjection, each oppressed by the appropriations of the other.

Lander St. was known as “Crack Alley”, the vortex of the city’s darkest mythology. The subjects portray ethnicities and/or sub-cultures whose speciﬁcity lies with themselves and within the context of the region. They retain their dignity even in abjection. The cultural horizon is described in metaphor of material conditions ( junk, graﬃti, worn-out clothes, cars, etc.) which function as the spectacle that transforms all things to their opposite. This expression of the spectacular paradox of cultural co-dependency should enable freedom from the old accepted patterns.

Interpersonal interactions are the key to transformations of any type. It is the non-judgmental way of seeing that is proper to the arts which allows things to be seen simply as they are, as statements of the nature of being.

In seeing the individuals as human beings who feel they have truly been seen, portraiture in this context creates a new pattern, a new mythology to shift the idea from stereotype to archetype, and further diminish the alienation felt by means of self contemplation, and to re-contextualize the culture.

In Beyond Despair, Theobald asserts that “it is possible to set up the conditions and contexts in which new and valid myths emerge spontaneously from the collective understandings of the culture”.

Now 30 years later as the city teeters upon gentriﬁcation, an upstate soho, artists and entrepreneurs, mitigated by the systems of the state, have created a new mythology to dawn on Newburgh’s cultural horizon.