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By chance we came across the photos of a previously unknown and unpublished photographer who anonymously took pictures of people on the streets of New York during the Fifties.
The mostly black and white pictures were taken in six by six format on a Roloflex and are simply stunning in their sharp capturing of texture and gradations of light. To say that they are superbly focused somewhat misses the point. Even though, on a computer, the pictures are two digitations away from the original analogue print, the pictures are sharp without the tracing delineation of digital captures.
The salient characteristic of all 100 or so photographs i viewed was one of unremitting hardness. The hardness of poverty, hardness in privilege, hardness of nails, hardness of sidewalks, the hardness of childhood.
There was almost no motion among the subjects who stood like pillars in plexiglass against a backdrop or horizon of walls in what ultimately became the many mansions of hell.
The beauty of the photographs arises from their artistry alone, not from what they depict which is more depressing than any German Expressionism whose freakishness becomes funny. There is no laughter here.
The photographs remind us that the Fifties were not quite the happy googah of Mel's Drive In; that poverty and grime was not confined to Appalachia, and that New York -- for all the fondness that a personal nostalgia might bear -- was unbearably ugly, a place from which the Hand of God had been withdrawn.
Paradoxically Vivian Meier worked all her life as a private nannie. Her work can be seen at http://www.vivianmaier.com/
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