Buffalo Art: CEPA exhibit takes viewers back to a different Buffalo

By Gabrielle Dubreville
(Images courtesy of Diane Bush and CEPA)

It’s taken 45 years, but Diane Bush’s street photography is finally coming into focus with an exhibit at CEPA. 

The exhibit is at CEPA’s Flux Gallery (617 Main Street, Buffalo) through July 17, and it is free to the public. CEPA (the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts) is open on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. and by by appointment on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. 

It’s been a long journey for Bush, an artist and activist. The exhibited photos were shot when she was still a student at University of Buffalo over 45 years ago. “No one really appreciated the work until now. It’s taken 45 years for people to realize these are historically significant,” Bush said. 

After trying to show this exhibit about 15 years ago at a train station terminal called “Echo,” she realized she had to wait a bit longer.

Bush said she knew that was going to happen. She knew people just needed time to appreciate this exhibit. She claims, “That’s what always happens with street photography. I just had to wait 45, 50 years for people to catch up.”

And now, it’s her exhibit’s time to shine. Shot in 1981, it highlights Buffalo’s streets of that era. 

When she first showed her work, she used a chinagraph marker to label the photographs along the wide border, in her own handwriting. She felt she needed to add this manual element to the otherwise mechanical feel of photography. 

After the original showing back in 1981, she often showed the work without the script. When she showed the work to CEPA, they really liked the writing. 

After needing to reprint certain images because she no longer had the originals, she also redid the writing on the border. “It surprised me how much people really liked the prints with the script,” she said. 

She then describes the picture used to advertise the show. “It’s a picture of a boxer wrapping his hand in white tape. Behind him are these wooden chairs that have these slats. The slats, the tape, his hand and his fingers are all strong linear elements. It’s one of the more artistic images of the show. That’s why I chose that for the signifying image of the show.” 

Bush spent a lot of time photographing boxers and spent the most time at the boxing gym downtown than at any other location. She enjoyed meeting Johnny Sudac, the trainer at the gym, and boxers, like Ralph Racine. “The joy of doing this kind of work is that you meet some interesting people … It’s the people that you meet that make street photography so rewarding,” Bush said. 

No one was photographing Buffalo in that way at the time she was. At the time, Buffalo in Rust Belt decline wasn’t considered a pleasing or positive image, which Bush says is, “exactly when you need to be taking pictures.” 

Bush said, “I knew they would be interesting historically, but I didn’t really understand I was the only one doing this work.”

Bush reminisced about Buffalo at the time: “The street was being torn up to lay the subway. The major department stores had pretty much all closed. Those big department stores were the heart of downtown. Buffalo was one of the last Rust Belt cities to take advantage of federal money allocated to the Rust Belt for renovation.”

“During the late ‘60s, most of the major cities had race riots, and after those riots, the social phenomenon called white flight, where white people escaped to the suburbs and wouldn’t enter city centers. Buffalo experienced this white flight. Downtown businesses had all closed, and in their place was nothing,” she added. “It was a very different landscape. It was in bad shape.” 

She says Buffalo has changed in terms of where people flock. Main Street used to be where all the action was, and now there’s more by the Canal area. She said that the population and activities have changed over the years. 

It is against this backdrop of a shifting urban landscape that Bush, an artist for most of her life, centered her work on street photography throughout the ‘70s, as her current exhibit at CEPA highlights.

She trained in England and ended up doing street photography with a photo collective, which was a radical idea in London at the time. She did a groundbreaking exposé of the gentrification of the London Wharf area at the time. 

She photographed working-class neighborhoods and worked in an unusual style in which she didn’t present photos as individual images, but credited the collective as a whole. Although this was seen as a radical idea at the time, these photos were eventually published in a book and exhibited at a London gallery.

She began working with female photographers, which she stated, “where not a lot of us were at the time.” But there were enough of them to do a couple of shows at the Neighborhood Half-Moon Gallery in the East End of London. One show called “Men,” another called “Women.”

She lived in the U.K. for 10 years before moving back home to the States for her mother.

After showing her street photography to professors at UB, one encouraged her to join the MFA program. On her first day of classes, she found out the professor who encouraged her had moved to California. The other professor there was not a fan of street photography because it didn’t “sell,” which was never her intention in the first place, and it was “dead.” 

She decided to go ahead with her street photography anyway, which did not please the professor or the art department at the time, as they didn’t consider it “art.” 

She needed to come up with a subject, and a friend at the time, who danced at a studio in downtown Buffalo, told her about Singers’ Gym. After promising not to use flash photography, she was granted permission to shoot. The photos are very dark and contrasted, giving them a gritty look. 

Not only has Buffalo changed over the years, but so has Bush’s art. After she finished Main Street, she never did any further street photography. 

“I had a feeling it would reemerge in the art scene again, but it would take a long time,” she said. 

She began experimenting with computer-manipulated photography. She worked with her husband on Digitally, where they took photos in Italy and digitally manipulated them. 

Then she got very serious about political satire. The Gulf War drove her to do more antiwar work, and then the Iraq War pushed her further and further into it. Warheads was published around 2005.

Since 1968, when she left the country because of the Nixon pushback against the antiwar protests, politics has shaped her entire life. 

“Politics has been a big part of my life,” she said.  

Now she focuses on political satire using embroidery. 

The idea for embroidery came from a woman in Canada named Diane Weymar, who started “Tiny Pricks,” where people embroider vintage handkerchiefs. Bush was inspired.

Bush has a hands-on workshop with Stitch Buffalo (284 Plymouth Ave, Buffalo) coming up on July 16  from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. It’s a multimedia workshop in collaboration with CEPA. It’s called “Sew on a Photo with Diane Bush.”