Deborah Dash Moore, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York

Reviewed by Daniel Morris

Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York
by Deborah Dash Moore
Cornell University Press
August 2023, 304 pp.

More than twenty years in the making, Walkers in the City is Deborah Dash Moore’s lavishly illustrated (149 photographs appear in the volume) and comprehensive study of how Jewish photographers (and non-Jewish influencers such as Lewis Hine and Berenice Abbott) represented New York City from the Great Depression through the early decades of the Cold War. Dash Moore encountered intriguing choices about how best to organize her capacious study. She could have focused exclusively on the history of the Photo League, an influential cooperative made up primarily of younger second-generation Jewish Americans who documented city dwellers in a style of “clean, honest, objective, and interactive interestedness” from 1936 to 1951. Alternatively, she could have developed a chronological account of New York Street photography, or offered a series of biographical studies of key figures such as Sid Grossman and Helen Levitt. Instead, Dash Moore organizes her study according to six themes: Looking, Letting Go, Going Out, Waiting, Talking, and Selling. Like most photographers she discusses, Dash Moore directs the viewer/reader to look outward, towards the social realms and public spaces in which ordinary New Yorkers engage with each other and their physical environment. Like the photographers, she is sensitive to how gender conventions impacted New York public spaces. As illustrated in Garry Winogrand’s “New York, c. 1962,” in which three men ogle “an elegant woman in a mink stole,” the male gaze served as a form of power and control. Sometimes, as in 1939 Sid Grossman’s “Harlem, WPA,” which depicts young African Americans at a de facto segregated swimming pool, New York was a racialized environment.

Alongside close readings of the photographs and in an appendix, we do learn about the biographical backgrounds of the more than forty photographers whose works appear in the main chapters. A distinguished historian at the University of Michigan who has co-authored a book on Jewish New York and has written a study of “GI Jews,” Dash Moore also provides historical contexts for the images. I especially appreciate her New Historicist approach, which, for example, connects images of people in phone booths to the development of this emerging technological feature of city life.

Walker in the City’s raison d’être is, however, less scholarly than celebratory. In an homage to a space and time that have passed, but that remain as traces in the vivid depictions on display in this handsome and informative volume, Moore offers a love letter to photographers who looked past ideological doctrine (worker strikes and political protests are set aside) to teach viewers and to remind themselves how to regard their fellow New Yorkers with the dignity of concerned attentiveness. We learn, for example, about the life and work of Esther Bubley. In high school Bubley took pictures of children and sold the images to their parents in her hometown of Superior, Wisconsin to “contribute to the household economy,” but she went on to become a serious photographer, although not officially part of the Photo League. Unwilling or unable to drive an automobile at the time, she kept a visual record of her journey by bus through the upper South in 1947 as part of Roy Stryker’s “photography division in the Office of War Information,” an experience that informed her sensitive portraits of civilians waiting at the integrated Greyhound Bus Terminal in New York City after World War Two. 

Unlike earlier twentieth-century modernists such as Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Strand, and Berenice Abbott, who emphasized the vertical dimension of the great metropolis with people dwarfed by their gargantuan surroundings, mid-century figures such as Bubley attend to the city’s horizontal front. Avoiding the picturesque style of image purchased by tourists who visited the New York World’s Fair of 1939, while also eschewing odd angles, bizarre shadows, and experimental techniques, Photo Leaguers and their ilk favored an eye-to-eye level perspective. As Dan Weiner, who photographed the playwright Arthur Miller standing in front of a crumbled brick building with the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance, but who refused Miller’s request to snap a photo of a sun-drenched panoramic view of New York’s skyline, told his famous subject, “I want to get people in some kind of relationship to meaning.”  The cityscape served as a theater in which civilians’ stage themselves. Settings are humble and quotidian: stoops, sidewalks, cafeterias, candy stores, phone booths, fruit and vegetable markets, bus station terminals, and laundromats. The street itself becomes a makeshift stickball court for an integrated group of kids in Arthur Leipzig’s “Stickball” (1950). Dash Moore features life in unheralded residential neighborhoods, but in the chapter devoted to “Going Out,” street photographers depict civilians seeing and being seen in legendary entertainment districts such as on the beach and boardwalk at Coney Island and outside the neon-lit movie palaces of Times Square.

Unlike a later generation of Jewish American photographers such as Diane Arbus, who focused her camera eye on extraordinary figures such as the iconic, identically dressed twins, and the “Jewish giant,” or Richard Avedon and Annie Leibowitz, who became rich and famous by representing fashion icons and music world celebrities, Photo Leaguers did not emphasize the least among us or those of privilege. This is, therefore, a book about how lower-middle-class second-generation immigrants – secular and Left-leaning -- imagined the vast middle of the social hierarchy, neither business titans nor Bowery bums, neither outsiders nor insiders. Taking an approach popularized by Canadian-born Jewish sociologist Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Dash Moore attends to “Jewish photographers who found themselves drawn to picture daily performances as they played out in urban neighborhoods.” Fashion decisions, facial expressions, gestures, postures, street signs, newspapers, and movie marquee headlines all convey semiotic meaning. One of Bubley’s images, “Greyhound Bus Terminal, New York City” (1947), depicts two white men sitting back-to-back on separate waiting room benches. One man “in a fedora and overcoat, reads the New York Herald Tribune, a middle-class newspaper. The working-class chap on the right wears a cap and rough jacket but no glasses. He reads a tabloid, the type of newspaper aimed at working-class readers.” As these two men read the news of the day, we engage in a semiotic analysis, in this case one that “depicts class differences.” Viewers also interpret the mood of subjects through a reading of their gaze, their facial expression, their posture. Are they cast as serious, playful, nonchalant, tired, hurried, poised, casual, regretful, cool, confident, hip, savvy, worried, or filled with longing? We read these non-verbal aspects of human expressivity with the same focused intensity as might a hungry passerby in N. Jay Jaffee’s “Kishke King, Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1953,” read and ponder the ”exuberant and excessive advertising [that] cover almost every inch of” a food stand or in Jaffee’s “Fools of Desire” (1950), which shows young women peering “at poster for a rerun” at a movie house on a rainy day.

Dash Moore’s decision to group photographs together according to subject matter has its advantages. Compared to a critical history of the Photo League, which would interest a relatively small number of cultural history buffs and scholars fascinated by a movement that combined aesthetics with social concerns in the middle of the twentieth century – or a photographer-centered study that would, inevitably, exclude interesting “minor” figures in order to highlight key contributors – Walkers in the City will appeal to a wide range of reader/viewers intrigued by examples of the deeply human desire to see and to be seen. The thematic approach enables Dash Moore to move in and out of fixed definitions of how to define what is a “Jewish” photographer or what were the tenets of the mid-twentieth-century “street” photography movement. The downside of the thematic approach in this case is that the reader looking for a historical throughline with a sustained chronology of the street photography movement will be hard pressed to find one. World War Two and its aftermath, for example, clearly influenced the movement. Here and there, we learn the following: documentary photography gained more respect during and after the war; a grainy immediacy, found in war photographs of Robert Capa, became more apparent; more women photographers found opportunities as men went overseas; images increased of “boys engaged in make-believe conflict”; Vivian Cherry photographed children playing in front of a swastika on a wall in Yorkville, an area “specifically linked to New York Nazi sympathizers”; Holocaust survivors who had relocated to New York City, as depicted by Sonia Nadelman Meyer, waited for support outside the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society; Cold War McCarthyism stifled the Left-leaning Photo League; and the growing prosperity of many New Yorkers after the war altered the urban landscape.  Dash Moore addresses these developments, but in different chapters. The reader interested in a major historical context such as World War Two must work hard to collate the information as it is sprinkled throughout this marvelously informative and entertaining study. 

Daniel Morris is a Professor of English at Purdue University and the author of After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers.