The New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce the exhibition The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives, will be open at the Society May 7 through August 14. This exhibition, organized by the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, is culled from the New York Times immense picture archives which contains millions of photographs dating from 1896 through the 1980s, when digital processing superseded traditional darkroom techniques.
The Tumultuous Fifties contains 195 black-and-white photographs depicting a decade distinguished by significant transformations in the cultural landscape, from McCarthyism, Sputnik, and Cold War politics to bebop, abstract expressionism and the Beats. The exhibition also is an investigation of the dynamics that defined the field of photojournalism during the decade.
Co-curators Douglas Dreishpoon of the Albright-Knox and Alan Trachtenberg, Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University reviewed thousands of prints from hundreds of subject files in the Times “morgue” (as the archive is referred to by those who frequent the vertical files). During this process they developed thematic categories for the diffuse mass of images: “America in the World: War Hot and Cold”; “Mechanization in Command”; “Growing up American”; “Fame and Infamy”; and “American Ways of Life” (with its six subcategories: “Politicking”, “Scapegoating”, “Demonstrating”, “Striking”, “Serving” and “Struggling”). Subjects include: suburban living, the nuclear age, integration, and totems of popular cultures such as hula hoops and drive-in theatres. Historical figures represented include: Edward R. Murrow, Richard Nixon, Milton Berle, Joseph McCarthy, Elvis Presley, Mickey Mantle, John Glenn and Nikita Krushchev.
Recognized early on as important cultural documents, prints from the Times archive have been featured in several landmark exhibitions. For The Exact Instant (1949) at the Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen, then director of the museum's department of photography, supplemented selected images from the newspaper's archives with others from archives across the country. In 1973 at MOMA, John Szarkowski used the same method for From the Picture Press. Both Steichen and Szarkowski approached their subject--newspaper photography--from a critical perspective, focusing on prints distinguished by their formal integrity. Both projects endowed everyday images published in American newspapers with unprecedented credibility by freeing them from contextual restrains of the printed page and presenting them in museum galleries.
The Tumultuous Fifties is an extension of these earlier projects, with a different set of objectives. Its focus is the cultural landscape of the 1950s, as documented by the Times, whose professional staff of full-time photographers include Arthur Brower, Edward Hausner, Patrick Burns, Sam Falk, Carl T. Gossett, Jr., Meyer Liebowitz, Ernie Sisto, George Tames and Neil Boenzi. Each made significant contributions to the field of news photography in the postwar era. In the exhibition, their prints complement others that ran in the Times by independent or agency photographers, such as Dan Weiner, Fred McDarrah, Hank Walker Rene Groable and Hans Namuth.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a 272-page catalogue, published by Yale University Press, with 200 illustrations, and introduction by Luc Sante, essays by Dreishpoon and Trachtenberg, and a chronology of the 1950s.
Support
This project is support with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Programs at the Historical Society are supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. American Airlines is the official airline of the New-York Historical Society.
The New-York Historical Society
The New-York Historical Society at West 77th Street and Central Park West is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am-5 pm. Admission is $5/adults, $3/students and seniors, children 12 and under free. For more information the public should call (212) 873-3400. Visit us on the Worldwide Web at www.nyhistory.org.
