>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Good afternoon.
My name is Jonathan Yardley.
I'm the Book Critic of
The Washington Post,
and happy to welcome
you to this room.
I'm surprised and pleased
that you were able to find it.
You really need a GPS to
navigate this dreadful building.
Jim Conaway and I have
been friends for 35 years.
In 1979 I was the Book Editor of
the Washington Star and had a call
from Jim, who wondered if I'd be
interested in having his services
as an occasional reviewer.
And my answer was absolutely
positive
because I very much admired a
book he had recently published
about Leander Perez, The Boss of
Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana,
and one of the truly malevolent
figures during the Civil
Rights years.
Jim has gone on to become
about the most versatile
and accomplished writer that
I'm able to claim as a friend.
He's written a number
of wonderful novels,
including most recently Nose, which
is a satirical and incisive novel
about the wine business
out in Northern California,
which he knows very well, having
written in a book called Napa,
the definitive book on that
endlessly interesting subject.
He has a strong interest in
the environment and was writing
about it long before it
became a fashionable subject.
He writes well, engagingly.
He's also a very good friend,
and he knows much more
about wine than I do.
Jim?
[ Applause ]
>> James Conaway: Thanks,
very much, John.
That was a wonderful introduction.
Thank you, all, for coming.
Before I read some from the
book, I'm going to turn this
over to my capable
Editor, Tom Wiener,
who spirited this project through.
>> Thanks, Jim.
I'm going to talk a little about
the genesis of this project,
and then Jim will do some readings,
and then our Photo Editor Amy
Pastan, is going to speak about some
of the individual photos.
And I should let all of you
know that there was a mistake
in the program about
our book signing.
In one page of the program it said
Jim was signing and, actually,
Amy signing with him between one
and two, but that's not true,
they're signing between
five and six.
So if you buy a book
bring it upstairs
and they'll be happy
to sign it for you.
Okay, The Forgotten Fifties,
it was conceived 10 years ago
when Amy Pastan, our Photo
Editor, suggested to Ralph Eubanks,
who is the former Director
of the Library
of Congress Publishing Office and
is sitting here in the front row,
that the Look Magazine collection
in the Library of Congress' Prints
and Photographs Division would
make a great foundation for a book.
A few years later Ralph and
Jim Conaway were having lunch
and talking about book ideas
and they came up with the idea
of having a book done
on the fifties.
They couldn't figure out a specific
angle on it, but they thought
that decade could have been
misunderstood over the years.
Ralph, subsequently to that, married
the idea that Amy came to him with
and the idea that he and
Jim came up with at lunch
and the project was born.
Look Magazine was published
between 1937 and 1971.
It was a large format
general interest magazine,
whose pages focused as much
on photography as on words.
Look was owned by the Cowles
family, that's C-o-w-l-e-s,
who published newspapers in Iowa
and Minnesota, though its editorial
and business offices
were in New York City.
The Library of Congress acquired
the magazine's photo archive
after Look closed its doors in 1971.
The Look collection is the
largest single collection
in the Library's Prints
and Photographs Division,
comprising of an estimated
five million items.
Although its photographs have been
used in publications before ours,
the The Forgotten Fifties makes
the most extensive use to date
of the Look collection, with
over 150 photos credited to Look.
We also used about two dozen
pictures from other Prints
and Photographs' collections.
So what was in a typical
issue of Look?
Well, they carried articles on
women's fashion and beauty, on movie
and television stars, on what the
magazine dubbed all American cities,
and on sports.
In the 1950s when the magazine
really hit its stride it also ran
features on the Cold War, on
the rise of Joseph McCarthy
and the Red scare he personified,
on race relations in the aftermath
of 1954's Brown versus Board
of Education Supreme Court
decision, and on women's issues.
The magazine frequently took
the temperature of the country,
with features like
What's On America's Mind.
For this series of
articles, which ran in 1951,
Look sent four staff photographers
to every state in the country,
and the result was an
evocative portrait of a country
which six years after the end
of World War II was caught
up in another much more
bewildering conflict in Korea.
We chose to call the book The
Forgotten Fifties in reaction
to nostalgia for that decade,
which is persistently glossed over,
its darker and more
complex features.
Many politicians and cultural
commentators tout the fifties
as a simpler and more
prosperous time in this country,
but the creators of this book
believe it was a deceptively simple
time, and we know that not everyone
shared in that decade's prosperity.
When I started working on the
project Ralph said to me, Tom,
this book is not about
the happy days fifties,
this book is about
the mad men fifties.
Yes, Look carried plenty
of articles and photos
to reinforce the Richie
Cunningham view of that decade,
but they also carried
reporting and photography
that reflected a Don
Draper view, as well.
Forgotten in out title also refers
to Look's place in
our cultural memory.
After its demise in 1971 Look
didn't have the staying power
of its more popular
competitor, Life Magazine.
In this book we've tried to show
how Look provided a unique view
of its times, not overtly political,
but also bolder and more courageous
than might be expected for a
large circulation magazine,
and thanks to Amy's diligence
many Look collection photographs
in The Forgotten Fifties were
never published in the magazine.
The Forgotten Fifties revisits
what some historians have called a
crucial decade.
In a time of immense contrast and
social turmoil we found a number
of dramatic pictures of a man
in Mississippi named J.W. Milam,
acquitted of murder
because he was white
and his victim was a young
black boy named Emmett Till,
of a Little Rock family
protesting the integration
of their central high school.
And, yes, we include other
family pictures, as well,
the familiar Ozzie and
Harriet and their sons.
But this was a decade in which
women's roles were changing,
a time of multi-tasking career
girls and working women,
and you'll learn more about
that photograph later.
It was taken by a very
famous film director.
And housewives grappling with
problems, like waiting in line
for the newly developed polio
vaccine in the midst of an epidemic.
In our pages you'll see familiar,
as well as forgotten faces --
Lucille Ball and Grace Natalius
[Assumed Spelling], Billy Graham,
and Norman Vincent Peale, Rocky
Marciano, and Rocky Graziano,
boxing was very big in the fifties.
And there are representatives
of the rising youth culture --
Dick Clark, host of American
Bandstand, a young man letting go
at an early rock-and-roll concert,
and one of our favorites,
a San Francisco Beatnik.
So to talk about these and
other photos in our book,
Jim Conaway will now return to
the podium and read from the book.
[ Applause ]
>> James Conaway: Boxing was
very big in Memphis, too,
when I was growing
up in the fifties,
there were no mad men there.
However, I think the fifties was
not just an emblematic decade
and a somewhat dark one,
as Ralph Eubanks pointed
out in the very beginning, but
it is one that's still with us,
that's kind of the irony of it.
And if you look at the
headlines today you see Cold War,
you see race, bad race
relations, you see sexism,
you see nuvo McCarthyism.
I feel like we're back in it.
In contemplating doing
this book I didn't want
to write a didactic explanation
of what the fifties were
and what they meant,
there's plenty of that
in the introduction to this book.
I wanted just to be able to sit,
as my parents had and others,
adults of the time, I
was a kid in the fifties,
and thumb through the magazine and
try to imagine what the reaction was
of the people in a half century
ago and more to these photographs.
But, as all the writers
in this room know,
a book does not work unless the book
has a consistent voice and something
that the reader can recognize.
And I began to work on that.
I looked at the photographs
myself from the old issues
of the magazine first and later at
those, a lot more than Amy found,
and I just began to write.
And the voice that emerged is what
I describe as first person plural.
It's I wanted it to be, I tried
to imagine what it would have been
like to be a reasonably intelligent
and educated American sitting
down after work or after the
kids were in bed or what,
and flipping through the magazine,
which is what most people did,
and what would have
been their reaction?
And the voice that emerged is really
quite, in some ways kind of bizarre,
it's sort of part my grandmother,
part my father, party my older,
wiser brother, but there
are other people thrown in,
comedians of the era, radio,
television and movies, of course.
And at the time, in the mid to
late fifties I would try and think
of being a writer myself, and I
had just begun to read Faulkner,
Hemingway, Carson, McCullers,
Carol Weekes [Assumed Spelling].
And so I think there's
some of that in there, too.
Then, of course, there's, you know,
I'm an adult now, so I see things
in the fifties and what
these photographs mean to me,
and I think what they
meant to others,
at a time that I know
something about it.
So I'm going to just read you from
the book about a few of these.
If you would, please
imagine yourself flipping
through the magazine, you
don't have time necessarily
to read the whole piece,
but what do these images,
imagine what these images do,
did to people at mid-century
and what they can also do to us
now when we look back on them?
Now we need, just show
me how to do this?
>> You need to start with the ...
>> James Conaway: This one?
Great, thanks.
Oh, there we go.
Those hats, not the fact
that so many men wear them,
but their uniformity,
squarely positioned,
broad brimmed, but not too broad.
Looking good matters,
although none of the men
on the train platform seems
aware of mirrors or anything else
that might interfere with their
orderly procession into Park Forest,
Illinois, one of Look's
all American cities.
The hats vary slightly, different
crowns, dense colored bands,
but collectively comprise a vast
ambulatory canopy above the city
and the nation's male
hood, protecting it as much
from powerful forces difficult to
comprehend this rain and the sun.
Let the face determine brim
width, Look advises us,
correct business attire
demands a hat, and buying
and wearing one meet the two
clear overriding social concerns
in the dead center of the American
century, conformity and consumption.
The Honeymooners has
now been a sketch
on the Jackie Gleason
Show for five years.
So popular they're making it
into a series all its own.
This intimate glimpse into
the lives of two couples
in the same apartment building is
supposed to be about domesticity
in urban America, but it seems to be
more about affection, perseverance
and the absurdity of ambition at
the bottom of the economic ladder.
Gleason volcanically rages at
Art Carney, but quickly runs
out of steam, his dreams and endless
frustrations hilarious and touching.
Carney's vest, T-shirt and hat,
with the upturned brim are as alien
to the suburbs as Gleason's
busman's jacket.
Like the grim efficiency
of a walkup flat,
garishly improved for
color television.
Carney's patience is saintly,
as if he instinctively accepts
limitations Gleason can't,
the two of them just
lovable, hapless, boy, men.
They're yoked in an
emerging portrait
of an alternative American
male, who has nothing in common
with the supposedly real men we
see in the car and clothes ads.
At the conclusion of the last war
800,000 women were fired from jobs
in the aircraft, automotive
and other industries
to make way for men.
Women belong in the home
now, using their pretty heads
to advance their husbands' careers.
They try to look sexy and
housebound at the same time.
One-piece bathing suits for
beauty contests and for sitting
in the kiddy pool in leafy
neighborhoods far from the city.
Skirts are long, underwear
powerfully conforming.
Matrons look matronly,
but then so do teenagers,
many of whom are taking up
sewing two-piece patterns.
Women still on America's assembly
lines look neither matronly nor,
even if pretty, remotely like
the women on magazine covers,
who seem to have been poured into
molds, dusted with pancake makeup,
teeth that are naturally white,
their auroras of hair
luminously lusciously blonde.
Their good humor painfully intense.
Even surfers and their
girlfriends at Waikiki Beach
and busy young Americans
rolling eggs wherever
on weekends seem desperate
to enjoy themselves.
A 19-year-old model featured
in Look, long-legged,
lean as a sapling, scrubbed, and
quote, works hard, rides, dances,
sings in a choir, can't
wait to get married.
She's already got her man.
[ Pause ]
Movies reflect an unsettling, almost
entirely white cinematic America
in a way they haven't before.
Asphalt jungle belongs to
the old comforting order
of low-class white
criminals in their own world,
with heavy Sterling Hayden and the
striking actress, Marilyn somebody.
But there's a new type of
troubling actor very much
in our world, like Montgomery Clift.
What's he looking at
in that photo anyway?
Not at us, that's for sure,
at nothing is more like it,
but nothing is what
Americans don't want to see,
although many of us are intrigued
by actors who look distracted,
overly serious, unpredictable,
impossible to ignore, bad.
Clift is kind of puny and wears
a wrinkled white T-shirt instead
of something with a collar.
He's sucking on a finger,
behavior unimaginable in a Bob Hope
or a Bing Crosby, who
is often photographed
with a perfectly normal
Chesterfield between his fingers,
his lazy eyes focused archly
and familiarly on the lens.
His song, Chattanooga Shoe Shine
Boy is right above Frank Sinatra's
on the charts, but it's hard
to imagine Montgomery
Clift singing anything.
Are these new actors
influenced by an ism?
Could existentialism have something
to do with the fact that the glass
of milk in front of
Clift is untouched?
You get the feeling he
doesn't intend to drink it,
not exactly un-American,
but different,
like those paperbacks
on the breakfast table.
In the South we're still pretty
close to slavery, that's according
to a shocking article by a
Negro Reporter named Carl Rowan,
who visits and finds that, quote,
the color of my skin
counted above all things.
He discovered, he says, dismal
squalor and old wounds opened.
Look at those black kids
without shoes, and white babies
with new ones sitting on
the laps of black nannies,
whose expressions say more than
words, not just their inequality
and doubt, but also perseverance.
And could that be Arnie
[Assumed Spelling]?
Wives and children need to look
good, too, to be protected,
but also to have some fun.
The kids in the portable pool on the
lawn are rambunctious, but not too,
their bodies bright in the sun,
the shadows starkly defined.
There's something touching about
the little boy's eyeglasses,
like his seriousness.
He's going to enjoy himself, period.
Mom has her own pool, and is
reading a magazine, either enjoying
or improving yourself, maybe both.
Her arms are propped on
the blowup pool sides,
and the bright plaid
one-piece bathing suit
and sunglasses become her.
So do the raised knee
and polished toenails.
There's another empty blowup
pool on a neighbor's porch,
leaning against the wall.
It's hot in Park Forest, and
everybody is going to make the best
of it when they get the chance.
Here's Joe McCarthy, again, foremost
scourge of communists in America,
taken on by the foremost broadcast
newsman, Edward R. Murrow.
He rode the airwaves during
the Nazi blitz on London.
Murrow's closing line then,
good night and good luck,
is still his signature
on television.
Murrow criticized McCarthy's
methods and claims
of a widespread communist
conspiracy in America.
Most everything about Murrow, thick,
dark chiseled hair, angular face,
dour expression is in contrast to
McCarthy, whose moonlight visage
and five o'clock shadow are
now well known to Americans.
So are the wisps of hair
that fall over his forehead
as he denounces people in the
State Department and the Military
in that relentless monotone.
He called Murrow the
cleverest of the jackal pack,
after Murrow's broadcast, which
is hard for anybody to believe.
More important, McCarthy failed to
address any of Murrow's criticisms.
The patience and sympathy
of Americans is peeling away
from old Joe, like his follicles.
Elvis, this was from Memphis.
I used to see him riding
down Poplar Avenue
in his midget racer
when I was a kid.
I wrote about that in another
book called Memphis Afternoons,
but Elvis, I can't look
at a picture of Elvis
without remembering those
times, and this is one of them.
It's a name nobody ever heard of,
even in Memphis when
he first recorded.
Elvis seems more astrological
than Southern,
a corn pone Dionysian deity from
the wrong side of the tracks,
with hair that defies
gravity and an angelic voice
that is both entrancing
and disturbing.
He seems to have arrived on
earth as he did on television,
in baggy slacks and jackets
straight out of Swing, with lyrics
and a beat as odd as his name.
His physical beauty
contorted and enthralled
to some violent sensuality.
No wonder parents secretly
fear this guy,
and Ed Sullivan won't
allow the television camera
to venture south of his belt buckle.
Elvis, for openers, is for
openers literally unhinged.
His hips and knees gyrating on
celestial strings we can't see.
His music both primitive
and hauntingly familiar.
Whenever he is singing he means it,
gripping the shaft of the microphone
like a weapon, one hand splayed
for balance, his eyes clamped shut
under dark overhanging brows,
and his mouth skewed not
in scorn, but rather in pain.
Five of his RPM singles have hit
the number one spot on the charts,
including Love Me Tender,
the title song
for a Civil War movie starring
this inexplicable weirdly crooning
presence from Tupelo, Mississippi.
[ Pause ]
A possibility for President in
1959 is that influential Senator
from Texas, Lyndon Johnson,
a big profane Democrat
who has a ready answer
for Look's question,
can a Southerner be
elected President?
The answer is yes, but Southern
politicians have been tainted
about the fear over continuing
segregation and their reluctance
to speak clearly about race.
Then, as Look has shown us,
Texas isn't really Southern,
but rather a world unto itself.
Could that be just what it takes?
A stronger candidate
might be found up north
in the higher reaches
of wealth and privilege.
The young Senator from
Massachusetts, John Kennedy,
seems more mainstream than Johnson,
and he's getting more
publicity of late.
Kennedy's good looks and easy,
outgoing manner remind you
for some reason of one of those
new mentholated cigarettes.
His wife is in a class by herself, a
cross between debutante and matron.
She's clearly at ease in that
chair, wearing virginal white,
but also a suggestive half smile,
watching something off camera.
It's probably a child, but
is he or she coming or going.
Jackie is poised there between
beauty and enduring motherhood.
The road before her
longer than we can imagine
at what will soon be the
outset of a brand-new decade.
The one about to pass
seems as if it went by not
in years, but in minutes.
Faces flashed across the screen as
they did in television's beginnings,
on them the essential American
smile, but now everybody looks older
and not necessarily wiser.
What happened to all those things we
were supposed to buy and couldn't,
hats, new cars, freezers, houses,
and all those personal things
we worried about and still do.
They haunt the decade as much
as anti-communism, Korea,
women in work, men in sports,
racial violence, quiz shows,
irrepressible music, and
juvenile delinquency.
Where is it all going, we ask,
even with the answer
right there before us
in grainy black-and-white
photographs and bright garish hues.
In those 1959 pictures the
country is still recognizable
from those shot in 1950,
but it's changing fast.
Again, right there under the surface
of the paper, the idea of us,
as alluring as ever, even
beautiful, untouchable.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Amy Pastan: Hi.
I'm a little shorter than they are.
Can you hear me?
Okay. I'd like to offer a
Photo Editor's perspective
of the images in the book.
I'd also like to acknowledge the
Prints and Photographs Department
of the Library of Congress.
I spent hundreds of
hours in that Division
to do the work on this book.
I looked at contact sheets and
slides and they were fantastic.
It's so great to live in a city
with a library of that stature.
And I'd like to acknowledge Tom and
Jim, who were great to work with.
All right, let's go.
The first image I'd
like to talk about is
of Duke Ellington on
the road in 1955.
It's by Charlotte Brooks.
During her tenure at Look
Magazine, from 1951 to 1971,
Charlotte Brooks was the only
female photographer on staff,
and when I say that I mean she was
not the only female photographer,
they had freelancers, but she was
the only female staff photographer.
She produced more than 450 jobs.
Look Magazine achieved its
highest circulation in those years,
and graced the coffee
tables and dens
of middle class families throughout
the U.S. Brooks' contribution
to the magazine and the field
of photojournalism is
especially significant
because she defied traditional roles
of gender, female, religion, Jewish,
and sexual orientation,
Lesbian, to achieve success.
Her artful and intimate images
were so closely identified
with the Look style that
she was often referred
to as Ms. Look instead
of Ms. Brooks.
At Look Brooks became one of the
guys, refusing to be pigeonholed
as a photographer of
women's subjects.
She volunteered for adventurous,
sometimes dangerous assignments,
underwater shoots in the deep
sea, aerial shots from helicopters
over Los Angeles, and bus tours
in the rural segregated South.
Here she captures bandleader
Duke Ellington, Mr. HiFi of 1955,
in a pick-up baseball
game with members
of his orchestra during
their tour through Florida.
He was at the top of his game in
the music world, but he had to stay
at the Astor, a colored motel,
as you can see in the sign,
in segregated Gainesville.
This photograph is
of the Korean War.
It's a helicopter evacuation
from 1952.
It's by Earl Theisen.
This is a real life episode of
Mash, but without the humor.
Korean war soldier, Private
Arthur Nelson, his leg smashed
by a burp gun fire, lies on a litter
while his buddies watch a helicopter
pilot fix a strap for the
hop to the field hospital.
Look Photographer Theisen was
there to capture the scene,
the soldiers huddling around
their fallen comrade, the concern.
Note the soldier, at left, his hand
touching the back of the soldier
in front of him, a gesture
of comfort and reassurance,
and the soldier kneeling before
Private Nelson, wishing him farewell
or a final keep your chin up.
Theisen's poignant photo
just not glorified combat,
but speaks to the very
personal tragedy of war.
This same photographer, working
for Look on the West Coast,
would train his lens on
Audrey Hepburn, Perry Como,
Elizabeth Taylor, and
Marilyn Monroe.
How did he end up in a battle
zone so far from Hollywood?
It seems that like many of
his colleagues, a good eye,
a strong sense of compassion,
and the ability to become one
with his surroundings
stood him in good stead.
He traveled the world
and photographed hundreds
of stories for Look.
As his daughter recalled,
Dad loved his job.
And how many people can say that?
He was so enthusiastic about
a new lens, about a new story.
I think he would vibrate
with enthusiasm
when he knew he got the shot,
when he knew his subject
was captured on film.
Okay, this is an awesome picture,
it's of a fan at a
Bill Haley Concert,
it was photographed in
1956 by Ed Feingersh.
When Bill Haley and the Comets
and Laverne Baker performed
at the Sport Arena in Hershey,
Pennsylvania on April 23rd,
1956 they rocked the place.
Look Photographer, Ed
Feingersh, trained his lens
on this writhing shirtless teenager
completely caught up in the moment.
More than any other shot he took
of the band performing that night,
and I know because I
looked at thousands of them,
this image conveys the raw power of
a new music genre, rock and roll.
It was an all body, liberating
experience, and it was this kind
of behavior that led many
parents of fifties' teenagers
to equate rock and
roll with the devil.
Nineteen-fifty-six was Elvis' big
year, but Haley had staked a claim
to rock and roll two years
earlier with the release of Rock
Around the Clock in 1954.
That anthem was number one on the
charts for eight weeks and went
on to sell 25 million
copies worldwide.
I've looked high and low for a bio
of the Photographer, Ed Feingersh,
but I only came up with a posting
on Facebook by a man who says
that Feingersh was his
Boy Scout Troop Leader
and Photography Teacher.
He claims that Feingersh was
a Holocaust survivor who came
to the U.S. after World War II
and studied photography at NYU.
The Library of Congress only has
three assignments by Feingersh,
who is said to have died young.
We've all, just about all of us
because we love it,
it's just amazing.
It's of the lingerie saleswoman
in 1950, it's by Stanley Kubrick.
Stanley Kubrick's films,
Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, 2001,
A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange,
and The Shining defined an era.
But before he made films Kubrick
taught himself how to use a camera,
and in 1945 at age 17 sold an
image to Look Magazine for $25.
He eventually became a fulltime
staff photographer for Look,
he was the youngest they ever
hired, and worked there until 1950,
when he left to pursue the
projects that would earn him fame.
The photographs show an emerging
talent, the dramatically lit,
strongly composed pictures engage
the viewer, even for this shoot
of a lingerie saleswoman,
seen here appraising her wares
on a live chain-smoking
model in Chicago in 1949.
There is an eeriness and
tension between the two women,
as well as between
them and the viewer,
that is powerful and memorable.
The model, front facing,
semi-clothed and ensconced
in smoke is bold in every way,
but the ambition and judgment
of the saleswoman at the
desk, seated and more passive,
is what really counts
in this business.
The story, Traveling
Saleswoman, ran in March 1950
and documented the work
and travels of Sue Hughes,
who worked for the
Formfit Company in Chicago.
Look was progressive in that they
covered the lives of working women
in the fifties, when women's
careers were often trivialized
or just ignored.
Here's our Men in Hats, this was
almost the cover of the book.
Okay, it's from Park Forest,
Illinois by Bob Sandberg, 1954.
Men came back from World War II
and went to work, they married,
had children, and by the early
fifties moved their families
to the suburbs.
Look Photographer, Bob Sandberg,
documented the new suburban
experience in a February 9th,
1954 story that focused
on Park Forest, Illinois.
This was a planned community that
offered housing for veterans,
and it was located
just outside Chicago.
It was a paradise for
the new middle class.
It had modern homes, green
lawns, parks, schools
and regular train service
into the city.
Here we see Park Forest, army
of commuters in the uniform
of the time, the hats, the
skinny ties, the suits,
very mad menesque [Assumed
Spelling].
They have just streamed from
a train onto the platform,
which can barely accommodate
all the bodies.
There's a gridlock waiting to
descend the stairs to the station.
The image has great perspective,
with tiny hats visible all the way
to the horizon, the composition
stresses the herd mentality
of these workers, who seem
to have sacrificed their
individuality for suburban life.
Sandberg was an early
employee of the magazine,
starting as a darkroom
operator shortly
after it published its
first issue in 1937.
He became an accomplished
photographer,
staying on for 32 years,
almost until the magazine
ceased operations in 1971.
In addition to documenting
the lives of many Americans,
who's names we will never know, he
photographed scores of celebrities
from Jackie Robinson
to Jack Kennedy.
This is by John Vachon, 1952,
Black Nannies with White Babies.
The Prints and Photographs online
catalog for this Look assignment,
and each Look assignment online
has a number and a description
of what is in the file folders with
their contact sheets or slides.
But the record for this one says
photographs show African-Americans
and segregation in the South,
primarily in Mississippi,
includes signs indicating
where African-Americans
can enter establishments,
purchase movie tickets,
eat, use toilets,
purchase a house, and be buried.
African-American men and women
in a variety of occupations --
street sweeping, digging
ditches, picking cotton.
African-American women
caring for white children.
African-American men
lounging outside stores.
Side view of a city bus with whites
seated in front, blacks in rear.
You get the picture of
what I was looking at.
This photograph was taken by John
Vachon, who served as a photographer
with the Farm Security
Administration,
which was a New Deal Program
to help the rural poor
during the Great Depression.
It also gave birth to one of the
world's greatest photo archives,
which is at the Library of Congress.
The article accompanying
his images was
by a young African-American
Journalist, Carl Rowan.
Look, liberal magazine that it
sometimes was, titled the piece,
How Far From Slavery, and ran
it in their January 1952 issue.
When I first saw the images I
couldn't believe they had been shot
in the fifties, they so
reminded me of photographs
from the early 20th Century
depicting the desperate poverty
and over-abuse of Southern Blacks.
How ironic that the pristine
and pudgy little white children
in this photo already at their
tender ages had more rights
and privileges than the
black woman who posed,
a little sheepishly it
seems, for Mr. Vachon.
And I'm going to end
with the mom in the pool.
It's a real fifties,
quintessential fifties image.
It's by Bob Sandberg and
Jack Star [Assumed Spelling].
It's from 1954.
Actually, I don't know which of them
took it, they both were on this job,
so it's either by Bob
Sandberg or Jack Star.
Like the earlier view of
the suburban commuters,
this image was taken in
this suburban community
of Park Forest, Illinois.
But for those who didn't commute,
like this stay-at-home mom,
there was a different kind
of security and saneness
to the suburban experience.
Park Forest was safe for kids.
There outside one's
tidy new home you
and your neighbors could enjoy
each other's company while watching
over the children and
maybe, if you were lucky,
you could steal a few minutes
to yourself, reading a magazine,
like Look, in your son's kiddy pool,
while the kids splashed
each other mercilessly.
Then one imagines you could haul
the kids inside, bathe them,
feed them an early supper, while you
donned a shirtwaist dress and pearls
and prepared a supper
for the tired husband,
who would soon walk
through the front door.
The photo highlights the
best and, well, not the best,
maybe what was pretty okay, and
the worst of the decade for women,
having it all, but perhaps
wanting something different.
As I looked at this image
I kept wondering if the mom
in the pool wanted to
make waves somewhere else?
Thank you very much.
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