“Perfect, nasty images”: Merry Alpern’s ‘Dirty Windows’

Deep in the bleakest of frigid New York winters – a winter so long and so cold the city ran out of gritting salt – Merry Alpern saw something she couldn’t take her eyes off. From a window in a friend’s grimy Manhattan building, she had a near perfect view into the bathroom of a new, secret, illegal ‘gentleman’s club’. If she waited long enough, from her angle, she could see the preludes and aftermaths of countless sordid, filthy, private encounters.

Now the American photographer’s images of those mid-winter trysts near Wall Street are being shown on the top floor of a derelict pub in King’s Cross, and the results are incredible.

The images were taken in the winter of 1993-94; they are grainy, monochromatic, barely focused, each one cropped close by the framing device of the window so you only ever get part of an image, a vignette. Everything is obscured, semi-anonymous. There’s a woman’s naked waist, a crack pipe being lit, hands stuffing a wad of money into a purse. You only ever get a small amount of visual information, but it’s not hard to figure out the whole story. Alpern lets the narrative unfurl in your mind, she lets you fill in the blanks, and it leaves you feeling gross, tainted.

The show gets more extreme as it progresses. Images in the third room show newly flaccid cocks, still in their condoms. A woman’s face grimaces, pressed almost up to the glass, a body thrusting behind her. If you weren’t sure what was happening in this illegal sex club before, you’re pretty damn certain now.

This is the hidden reality of New York at its avaricious peak, when Wall Street capitalism was hyper-bloated on its own extreme excess, filled with vile, coked up, greasy men – a whole bunch of whom found their way to this club, to these women, and to this photographer’s lens. Alpern is giving you a tiny, stolen glimpse of the city’s darkest secrets, of a hidden reality of rampant mid-90s capitalism. If the images are stomach turning, that just means you’ve got a moral head on your shoulders, the disgust just means you’re still human.

Not that these works are without their issues. There are some incredibly dubious ethics at play here – no one in her photos was asked for permission, and an artist using anonymous sex workers for her own gain is inarguably exploitative. If you take issue with that, you’re not alone; Alpern had her grant denied by the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994, and was subsequently held up as an example by congressional conservatives of why the institution should be defunded (The Museum of Modern Art in New York then stepped in to collect the work).

You’ve got to wrestle with those ethical questions, and that culture war legacy, when you look at these photos, but does that make them bad art? I’m too overwhelmed, affected by their aesthetic power, their grainy intensity to think particularly clearly about ethics, and to an extent it just adds to their grubby impact.

The setting of the show massively elevates the work too. This isn’t a dour, dull white cube gallery space, it’s the upstairs of a derelict pub, the gritty staff accommodation of McGlynn’s, a much loved King’s Cross boozer that closed when its owner Gerry died in 2023. Its wallpaper is peeling, its walls are mouldy, its carpet is sticky. This is where these photos belong, where they look at home – it’s the kind of place you can imagine Alpern’s acts happening in. It makes you feel like you’re somehow in the photos, or just next door, waiting your turn.

The pub has been bought by the artist Peter Doig and his partner, the gallerist Parinaz Mogadassi, who organised this show. Soon, they’ll do it up, sort out the damp, rip up the carpet. But for now, it’s the perfect nasty counterpoint to these perfect, nasty images.

Among the hundreds of shows opening this week to coincide with Frieze, this might just be the most special, unique and essential. These are photos of desire and greed, profit and exploitation, ecstasy and abject sorrow – drugs, sex, money, desperation, all the ingredients of the human condition are right here, and it makes for some deeply bleak viewing.