Robert D'Alessandro’s ‘Glory’ Examines America Behind the Flag

ANDES — On this near-peak foliage Saturday afternoon at the Leo Koenig Gallery in Andes, October was in the air, bringing another weekend of pleasant temperatures and the unmistakable change of seasons. Inside the gallery, Robert D'Alessandro’s Glory opened a portal into America’s past relationship with patriotism, political faith and the traditional symbolism used to inspire greatness, honor and national identity, juxtaposed against poverty, race, resistance and an unwillingness to follow blindly.

American flags recur throughout D'Alessandro’s black-and-white photographs, but rarely with a single meaning. A flag appears above a smiling interracial couple. Elsewhere, a young man sits nearly naked on a couch draped in the Stars and Stripes. Another photograph captures a shopping cart beneath the enormous lettering of a King Kullen supermarket, while other images place patriotic symbolism among the unvarnished circumstances of ordinary American life. Rather than instructing viewers how to interpret the flag, D'Alessandro repeatedly places the symbol back among the people living beneath it.

That tension reflects D'Alessandro’s own relationship with America. He spoke of an immigrant father who read Thomas Jefferson and Shakespeare and of teachers who encouraged him to take the country's democratic ideals seriously. Those lessons eventually collided with what he witnessed around him. “I’m not a rightist. I’m an American,” D'Alessandro said. “You help people. Period.” He recalled questioning an eighth-grade teacher who romanticized the Confederacy, unable to reconcile those sentiments with slavery. 

His camera became one way of confronting those contradictions. D'Alessandro photographed during an era shaped by Vietnam, racial conflict and enormous political and cultural change. Looking back, he described moments when photography seemed almost instinctive. A teacher once told him, “Sometimes a picture takes you, you don’t take it,” an idea he carried through decades of making photographs. 

One of the remarkable stories behind the work involves blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. D'Alessandro recalled hearing Trumbo speak on public television and responding by sending him photographs. Trumbo called and invited him to Hollywood, where D'Alessandro said he spent roughly two weeks with the writer and his wife. D'Alessandro had initially hoped Trumbo might write something to accompany his photographs, but instead Trumbo sat him in front of a typewriter and encouraged him to write about the pictures himself. D'Alessandro said Trumbo admired the resulting writing for being clear and simple and had intended to contribute to the project before his death. 

D'Alessandro's career also brought him through journalism, television and teaching, including three decades at Brooklyn College. He remembers a period when journalism felt capable of confronting powerful institutions and exposing things that needed to be seen. He spoke during the reception about working with journalists and photographers who went into the world looking for stories rather than arriving with conclusions already established.

Over time, D'Alessandro felt commercial pressures increasingly changed that environment. He recalled being asked to make photographs that fit ideas conceived elsewhere and becoming disillusioned with media increasingly concerned with selling an image or attracting an audience. “I thought I was doing something,” he said of his earlier work. It had meaning, he agreed during the conversation, before adding simply that the feeling eventually “evaporated.” His independent photography offered somewhere else to go. 

Among those attending Saturday's opening was painter Wayne Morris, director of the Longyear Gallery board in Margaretville and one of D'Alessandro's closest friends from their youth in Islip, Long Island. Their reunion added a personal dimension to photographs carrying the weight of American history. Morris recognized at least two images made inside his apartment, and the two artists spoke warmly about the influence each had on the other's creative development. Each suggested, in essence, that he might not have become the artist he did without the other.

That friendship provides an intimate counterpoint to the larger questions running throughout Glory. Decades after D'Alessandro made many of these photographs, they preserve more than a record of an earlier America. They preserve an argument Americans continue to have with themselves about what patriotism requires and whom its symbols represent. The flag throughout D'Alessandro's work can suggest sacrifice, belonging, resistance, authority, hope or contradiction depending upon the person standing beneath it.

Those tensions have hardly disappeared. In a political climate increasingly divided over the meaning of patriotism, while anti-fascist groups and other protest movements again gather in streets across the nation, D'Alessandro's tremendous body of work resists providing an easy answer. Instead, Glory preserves the dialogue itself, asking viewers to look beyond the symbol, examine the country behind it and decide for themselves what they see.

Photo: Photographer D’Alessandro will Longyear Gallery Executive Director Morris, childhood artistic influences of each other from Islip, Long Island