Gus Aronson’s Tokens of New York in the Age of Isolation

It’s a phrase you don’t hear too much anymore, and no one quite agrees on its origins. It’s a warning to the wide-eyed against being swindled. It’s a reference, perhaps, to the tokens at a fairground, whose value disappears when the lights go off. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” Ann cautions her husband, Peter, in Edward Albee’s play At Home in the Zoo (2004), but Peter doesn’t know the old adage. He meets an unhinged man in a park, someone who thinks differently and suffers from too much solitude, and the encounter doesn’t end well. During the Great Depression, a bank in Washington state ran out of money and issued wooden nickels. In 2004, during the Iraq War, a retired US Air Force sergeant manufactured wooden nickels to support the troops. You couldn’t use them in a vending machine, but that wasn’t the point. Their value was patriotic, mystical. You had to believe, and if you did, you were all the richer.

Not long ago, Gus Aronson, a twenty-two-year-old photographer and filmmaker, was in Highbridge Park, in Upper Manhattan, photographing skaters at a skate park, when he met a man dressed in sequins and carrying two slabs of drywall. The man wore a spectacular necklace, and when Aronson asked him about it, the man said it was a symbol of recovery. “We had a conversation about COVID, about the future,” Aronson said recently. “He thinks that everything’s about the number six in society. The mask is a sixth sense. You have to be six feet apart. But then he says, ‘Three is the future.’” The man thinks there should be a three-party system in government. He wants homelessness to be written into the US Constitution. He wants to form a skate team in Washington Heights, and he’s been talking to school principals about coaching it. Was he peddling wooden nickels? “He’s very adamant that people need to respect each other and love each other more,” Aronson said.

Aronson grew up in Riverdale, a Bronx neighborhood west of Van Cortlandt Park along the Hudson River. He graduated from Bard College in May, and like a lot of students and postgraduates in our age of pandemic, he has returned to living in his childhood bedroom—above the door, there’s a sign that reads, “Sanctuary.” Aronson took most of the photographs in his new series Tokens from an Unled Life (2020) in and around Yonkers, Upper Manhattan, and the Upper West Side. He was searching for a way to accept the present, to allow opposite and contradictory phenomena to coexist; like the photographers Tim Davis and Torbjørn Rødland, Aronson has an eye for vivid color and ambiguous narrative. There’s an echo of Albee’s play in Aronson’s chance meeting with a skate park prophet, but he drew his series title instead from Joan Silber’s shrewd 2017 novel, Improvement, which traces how the subtlest, most impulsive decisions can have a devastating effect, setting in motion a course of events that might remain concealed from you forever. In one scene in rural Turkey, Dieter, a young German who raids archaeological digs for treasures to sell abroad, gives an American named Kiki a tarnished Ottoman coin: “‘Not so valuable,’ he said, looking into her eyes. ‘Only good to look at.’ Kiki still had it, a token from an unled life.”

Throughout Aronson’s peripatetic wanderings in New York’s emptied-out streetscape, he found tokens and totems, signs that could be taken for wonders. In Yonkers, outside a police recreation center, a man’s face has been ripped from a banner, leaving only a bodily shape in military fatigues and an American flag with a gaping hole. A bottle of Lexapro, the antianxiety medication, becomes a portal to another world; the bottle maker’s slogan, raised in amber plastic, is “Safe & Friendly.” In the window of an Upper West Side shop, Aronson found a painted tableau of US presidents—Johnson, Obama, Clinton, Kennedy, and Truman are all there, cheerfully playing pool—that appears to slide, like a double-exposure, beneath a glass-reflected street scene. (The painting, Callin’ the Red, is by Andy Thomas and strangely, it appears duplicate, in a frame on the wall behind Obama’s smiling face.) One delicate image in Tokens of an Unled Life is a grid of headshots of firefighters. Their names, like some of their impressive moustaches, reveal only the slightest biographical detail. In this year’s fever dream of sirens and statistics, Aronson’s picture seems to ask: Are these men still with us? Who have they helped (or harmed)? Who have they loved?

“I began to see objects as vessels and people as fortune-tellers,” Aronson said. “Photographing in a world so divided and isolated, it was important to remind myself that we are, in many ways, still connected.” The coin that Dieter gives Kiki in Improvement is a bid for connection—an intersection, as Aronson noted, “between a factual past and a fictional present.” Kiki never does show up to meet Dieter, and one day in Berlin, Dieter meets a woman named Gisela, who would become his wife, “his greatest stroke of luck.” But is love, like street photography—that album of decisive moments—about luck, or something else, something random or willful? A golden coin or a wooden nickel? In a token Aronson found on a summer afternoon, in the crystalline light of a turquoise pool, a hand touches a knee—an impossibly tender gesture at a time of enforced distance. But maybe it was a chance encounter. “People always went for the most romantic interpretation; you couldn’t blame them for that,” Silber writes toward the end of Improvement. “What they felt most strongly seemed most true.”