About this Event
WHO & WHAT: Join Rep Club for a discussion celebrating the monograph: by photographer Gerald Cyrus, in conversation with photographer & Uptown Odyssey editor Gioncarlo Valentine.
These are not documents of spectacle. Cyrus turned his lens on the people who gave Harlem its soul, finding in ordinary moments an extraordinary depth of feeling.
WHEN: Doors at 6:30pm, event promptly at 7pm.
WHERE: Reparations Club, 3054 S. Victoria Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90016
HOW:
TICKET w/ BOOK: This ticket guarantees a seat including a signed book available for pick up at the event.
FREE RSVP (No Book Included): This Free RSVP DOES NOT include a copy of the book and entry is based strictly on capacity at the door. Books may be available for purchase in-store.
SIGNED BOOK ONLY: Can't make it IRL but still want a signed copy? Order directly from our site!
Please email us at [email protected] if you have any additional needs, questions, or accessibility concerns.
About the Book:
TBW BOOKS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE PUBLICATION OF UPTOWN ODYSSEY, A NEW MONOGRAPH BY ARTIST GERALD CYRUS, EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GIONCARLO VALENTINE.
Uptown Odyssey gathers Gerald Cyrus's black-and-white photographs of Harlem made across the 1990s—a decade-long portrait of a neighborhood at the height of its cultural life. Cyrus arrived in New York in 1990 to attend graduate school at the School of Visual Arts, and spent the years that followed roaming the streets with his camera, attuned to the rhythms of everyday life. The work moves in a lyrical arc: from the street, with its children, families, characters and storefronts, down into the subway and that unique state of in-between, and back up again into the electric atmosphere of the nightclub, where music—the life force Harlem was so celebrated for—fills the room.
These are not documents of spectacle. Cyrus turned his lens on the people who gave Harlem its soul, finding in ordinary moments an extraordinary depth of feeling. His photographs carry the influence of Roy DeCarava and the tradition of the Kamoinge Workshop, the legendary Black photography collective of which he was a member—images that hold their subjects with care and without distance, in an era when people moved through public space with less wariness of a camera turned their way.
Central to the book is Gioncarlo Valentine's account of the year he spent with Cyrus in his Philadelphia studio, poring over silver gelatin prints and printing alongside him in his darkroom—a whole row house given over to decades of work. Many of the subway photographs collected here were placed in a box more than thirty years ago after being dismissed as too familiar. They are published for the first time in this book.
Uptown Odyssey is a long-overdue reckoning with an indisputable body of work—and an act of witness to the dazzling world Gerald Cyrus spent a decade recording.
GERALD CYRUS is an acclaimed photographer whose work captures the richness of Black life, culture, and community. Born in Los Angeles, Cyrus began his photographic career in 1984, documenting jazz musicians and urban life before moving to New York City, where he earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts.
A member of the historic Kamoinge photography collective, Cyrus is best known for his intimate documentation of Harlem’s vibrant jazz scene and everyday life. His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, and the New Museum, among others. A recipient of both the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Cyrus has published four books, including his latest, Uptown Odyssey (2026). He currently lives in Philadelphia.
GIONCARLO VALENTINE (b. 1990) is an award-winning American photographer and writer from Baltimore City who is invested in Black life, lineage, and legacy. His work has been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, he was awarded a 2024 Communication Arts Award, and he was the subject of the 2024 American Masters documentary, Exposures, on PBS. Gioncarlo has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, McColl Center, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. He has been commissioned by Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and Scientific American, among many others. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Aperture, THEM, Insider, The Rumpus, and he is currently at work on his debut essay collection.
Event venue & nearby stays
Reparations Club, 3054 South Victoria Avenue, Los Angeles, United States
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