New York City, in the early 1950s boasted three morning and three evening newspapers. A tabloid, The Daily News, “New York’s picture newspaper,” enjoyed the largest circulation (and still does), employed the greatest number of staff photographers, printed more photographs per page than anyone else and paid the most for the work of the amateurs they published. Their masthead, even today, still contains the logo of a four-by-five inch speed graphic press camera that used sheet film, the mainstay of the photojournalist at that time.
During that period I attended a specialized art High School in Mid-Manhattan majoring in illustration and photography while following an academic track. Among our heroes or role models were the working professionals in the communication arts. The most famous of these were Life Magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, a Jew who fled from Nazi Germany in 1935 and helped define American photojournalism with 90 Life Magazine covers, and “Weegee”, the pseudonym of Arthur Felig, another Jew, known for his street photography of crime scenes and emergencies. His car contained a portable shortwave police radio, as well as a complete darkroom in the trunk.
This same “Daily News” once paid me twenty-five dollars, a princely sum at that time, for my street photograph of a fist-fight in Greenwich Village the paper printed in its centerfold. The standard drill, as all school photography majors knew, was to telephone the newspaper when one felt they had a newsworthy photo. A rolling radio car would pick up the film and drop it off at the paper’s lab, where it would be developed and printed. If used, the standard fee would be paid. It was my privilege, 25 years later, in Jerusalem, to assist another “great”, Nachum Tim Gidal, a contemporary of Eisenstaedt, with his books.
Men’s fashions in the 1950s dictated hats be worn and hair be short and trimmed. A common stereotype in films and novels of the period required reporters and press photographers to display their press passes in the hat bands of their snap-brim fedoras or pork-pie hats, so they would be readily admitted to the scenes of murder, mayhem or catastrophe.
This portrait still gives me a wry sense of satisfaction, not to mention a feeling of déjà vu, when I see it. Hair is back in fashion and lots of it! I now sport my own, greatly coveted press pass declaring to the whole world that I am now an accredited photographer for The Jerusalem Post; my evolution is complete! The pass, though, was affixed to an Israeli national symbol at that time - the “kova tembel”*, rather than a fedora. I was now able, as if by magic, to breach police barricades and military security checkpoints at will!
What Bliss! What self-fulfillment!
August 2, 2011
* In Hebrew slang, “tembel” means silly or fool.
In retrospect, writing about events from the early 1970s, who could have predicted the almost total demise of film photography worldwide within a fifty-year span its replacement by digital wonders producing amazing images, many times taken by people with limited or non-existent knowledge of photography. The iPhone has bestowed this upon mankind! The death knell was the discontinuance of Kodak’s Kodachrome, the industry standard for color transparency film. Agfa, Ilford, Kodak–household names were contracting. The discipline of the darkroom was also vanishing, taking along with it the art of choosing paper grades, cropping, masking, exposure time, filters, dodging and the anticipation of results that delayed gratification. Limited are the facilities and opportunities to create art in a darkened room lit only by red bulbs and peopled for the most part by elder citizens unwilling to relinquish past achievements or to submit to the current permissiveness or ignorance of youngster photographers nurtured on Photoshop;they feel they have the right to move mountains to more visually convenient locations or to create colors that did not exist in what they had seen, imagined or even in nature per se.
My generation had “Dektol” for paper, D-76 for film. Today’s generation has the “selfie stick” to show each other where they have been, and what they did there, if anything, when they arrived. There is still the need to document the contributions they made in passing. The greatest loss of all was the magic I can still remember as a young boy watching, for the first time, an image emerge on a sheet of paper in a developing tray, where it slowly becoming a photograph of something recognizable.
March 18, 2016
Note: Commentary dates written by Mr. Bloom are in italics