Images of 1940s Manhattan. More here. The modern age is looking more and more like a distant historical period…
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6 thoughts on “1940s Manhattan, an age ago”
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These are the Cushmans, aren’t they? It’s an extraordinarily interesting collection from one man prepared to “waste” expensive colour film on precisely the kind of boring everyday street scenes that, 60 years on, hold and fascinate. The “other” great collection from the period required government intervention (and the Dustbowl) to get it underway…
It’s interesting how colour photography took off in the US, Germany and Japan in the ’30s and ’40s but not in Britain in the same way. So many early Kodachromes of Britain turn out to be the work of GIs. Was it the first time when we really weren’t pioneers of an important new technology?
I do wish my great-grandfathers had chosen something else to ignore: the failure of early colour photographers in London – from Alfred Kahn’s men onwards – to make it in the East End, or indeed away from Piccadilly Circus and London Zoo and the equivalents (so many flower clocks, so few markets, factories and railway stations) is a source of endless frustration.
A GI filmed a Burnley match in colour c. 1943-44. It would be another ten years before the Brits could be bothered to follow suit, and 25 before they did it in any sustained manner.
I believe they are by Cushman, James – however I’m very far from being an expert in photography. The composition seems consistently striking. He achieves again and again a sort of understated panoramic drama. It was my wife who found these – I just heard a lot of ‘wows’. New York – these provide a reminder of what an incredible place it is.
Fascinating. But – correct me if I’m wrong – just one black face. OK, he’s not shooting uptown in Harlem, but it is remarkable to see (the pictures of Chinatown aside) so monochrome a Manhattan.
By the way, the bar on E 7th Street is not just any bar, but McSorleys, which when that pic was taken, and for several decades longer, refused to permit women within its doors. Interestingly – well, to me – is the fact that the first recorded instance of the phrase ‘Male chauvinistic pig’, usually associated with the 1970s, was apparently uttered around the time of this shot as the response of one of the women who found themselves banned from the place. For those who would like more on McSorley’s, and on 1930s-40s Manhattan read Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and his other collections of reportage. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer who covered Manhattan when it looked just like these photos. His amazon page is: http://amzn.to/qJmkXm.
It’s interesting to note that the 1960 photos show little technical improvement over those taken in 1941/42, which is tremendous testimony to the brilliance of early Kodachrome and its storage qualities. Oh that Ilford, the undoubted masters of black and white, had had the resources in the mid/late 1930s to develop its fledgling colour business.
I was particularly taken by those wonderful red-brick buildings, and the shots involving tenement dwellers, salvage collectors, and the South Ferry bums. I wish there were a London equivalent.
Colour can blur the edges of urban life, decay and deprivation, nonetheless, absorbing. The ‘analogue’ nature of some of the photos shows they may be Ektachrome rather than Kodachrome, the difference, according to Kodak, only in the processing, anyone with normal kit could process Ektachrome whereas Kodachrome required their own equipment (manufactured incidentally in their Stevenage factory.) In reality Kodachrome had a cooler tint especially Kodachrome25. I used both until four years ago, before joining the digital revolution and john is right, I recently scanned the entire collection and found marked deterioration of the late seventies stuff. Kodachrome no longer with us although the superior Fuji Velvia still is.
Kodak’s boast used to be it’s length, the factory, in Rochester, over four miles long. Still at the cutting edge, the latest Leica uses a Kodak sensor.
American decay is as marked in the country as it is in cities like Detroit, crystal meth now the numbness creator of choice provoking, as the photo shows, a backlash. From who I wonder.
Like John, I also found myself studying the differences between the 1940s and 1960s photographs. What the ’60s streets lack in technical improvement they make up for in their greatly improved tidiness – streets remarkably devoid of litter and pedestians (even street vendors) in crumple-free clothing.. There’s also the superior photographic technololgy – the added crispness – and vibrancy of colour. Yet in the later photogaphs, it’s as if some of the character has been drained away.