'A walk back in time': Monroe Gallery of Photography takes viewers back to classic Hollywood

Via The Albuquerque Journal

March 11, 2024

By Kathaleen Roberts

Francis Ford Coppola directing Marlon Brando.

Jimmy Stewart working on “Harvey.”

James Dean taking a nap in his truck.

Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography is taking viewers back to old movie glamour with photographs from classic Hollywood.

“We wanted to take a little break from some of our more serious exhibitions,” said Sidney Monroe, gallery co-owner. “And this being awards season with the Academy Awards coming up, there’s a great range of materials with the photographers we represent.”

The 45 images feature such Hollywood icons as Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Steven McQueen, Robert Redford, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and more. The photographs depict them both on and off the set and in studio portraits.

“It’ll be a little bit of a walk back in time,” Monroe said.

Steve Schapiro was the on-set photographer for “The Godfather” (1972).

Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola, “The Godfather,” Steve Schapiro.

Courtesy of Monroe Gallery

“I remember him telling us they were collaborating,” Monroe said. “Coppola’s telling Brando where the camera’s going to come in. It’s an interesting behind-the-scenes moment with an actor and director.”

Photographer Richard Miller captured James Dean sleeping during a break in the filming of “Giant” (1956).

“He’s napping in his truck with his feet up in the window,” Monroe said. “That James Dean was killed shortly after contributed to that icon. (Miller’s) got another one of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean taking a break.

James Dean takes a break from filming “Giant,” Richard C. Miller, Texas.

Courtesy of Monroe Gallery

“It’s photography that creates images of these bigger than life characters,” he added.

In “Harvey” (1950), James Stewart played a man dubbed crazy due to his insistence that he has an invisible six foot-tall rabbit for a best friend. Life magazine’s Ida Wyman, best known for her images of New York street life, shot Stewart during the filming. Wyman was one of the early female photographers. The field was almost exclusively male when she started during the 1940s.

“She found a lot of work for Life in Los Angeles,” Monroe said.

Sonia Handelman Meyer’s striking 1948 image of the Paramount Theater encapsulates the glitz and glamour of the movies.

“We’ve got a beautiful photograph of the marquee.” Monroe said. “The movies (functioned) as an escape from hard times.”

Tony Vaccaro’s on-set shot of Federico Fellini directing 1960s “La Dolce Vita” reveals the old school cameras used in the production.

Fellini on the set of “La Dolce Vita,” Tony Vaccaro, Italy.

Courtesy of Monroe Gallery

“The director’s stepping in,” Monroe said. “To me, it looks like he’s telling the actress how to pose.”

Ocean’s Eleven” cast, Sid Avery/mptv images

Courtesy of Monroe Gallery

Sid Avery’s photograph of the 1960 “Ocean’s 11” cast features Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peter Lawford, among others.

“Now there’s been I don’t know how many remakes or new versions have been made,” Monroe said. “We actually had that picture in the gallery in New York when the first remake was being made. Julia Roberts came in and bought it as a gift for the director (Steven Soderbergh.)”

'THE MOVIES'

WHEN: Through April 14

WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., Santa Fe

MORE INFO: monroegallery.com, 505-992-0800

Video: Ida Wyman, East Harlem, 1947 in Color

 

View the exhibition on-line here

International Acclaim For the Exhibition "Ida Wyman: Life with a camera"

Ida Wyman: Man looking in wastebasket, Coney Island, New York, 1945

Today, March 7, would have been Ida Wyman's 94th birthday. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926 in Malden, Massachusetts. The family soon moved to New York, where her parents ran a small grocery store in the Bronx. Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and she joined the camera club at Walton High School, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures. By the time Wyman was 16, she know that she wanted to work as a photographer.

Opportunities then were few for women photographers, but in 1943 Wyman joined Acme Newspictures as a mail room ‘boy’; pulling prints and captioning them for clients.

When the war ended, Acme's only female printer was fired so a man could have her job. Wyman set out on her own to begin free-lance work for magazines, and her first photo story was published in LOOK magazine the same year. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for LIFE magazine. She would eventually cover over 100 assignments for LIFE.

For the next several years, Wyman covered assignments for LIFE, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Parade, and many other leading publications of the time. Ida Wyman passed away in July, 2019. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world.

HUCK Magazine

The unsung photographer of the 20th century: Celebrating Ida Wyman

The Daily Mail

The best photographer you never heard of: Ida Wyman captured 1950s American street life, Hollywood glamour and the euphoria of the Allied victory over Japan - now it's all rolled into one glorious exhibition

Ida Wyman: Life with a camera continues through April 19, and selection from the exhibit will be on view in our booth #A1 during Paris Photo New York Presented by AIPAD at Pier 94 in New York, April 2-5.

Monroe Gallery at the 2020 Photo LA Fair

We are pleased to again be exhibiting at the longest-running international photography fair on the West Coast, the Photo LA Fair. This year the fair takes place January 30 – February 2, at The Barker Hangar, 3021 Airport Ave, Santa Monica. Monroe Gallery will be located in booth #A02, just to the right of the main fair entrance.

The gallery will be exhibiting a selection from the just-concluded acclaimed exhibit “La Dolce Vita” that celebrated Tony Vaccaro’s 97th birthday alongside photographs by Ida Wyman (1926–2019), whose work for Life, Look, and other magazines went unrecognized for decades. A special exhibit will showcase work of the new wave of fearless frontline photojournalists that are covering 21st-century events.

The fair will feature photography from more than 60 local and international galleries and dealers, but will also welcome collectives, leading not-for-profits, art schools, and global booksellers. Moreover, the fair will present renowned lectures, panel discussions, special installations, and docent tours.

The Private Vernissage will take place on Thursday, January 30th, from 4 to 6 p.m, while the Opening Night Preview will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. The doors of the fair will be open to the public from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

Tickets and more information can be found here.

Ida Wyman’s Photography Documents Life in the 1940s and ’50s

"The News Girl" by Ida Wyman

Via Madison Magazine
By Katie Vaughn


What a gift to be able to document life—to capture a moment and preserve it, to put a small pause on the fleetingness of time but also share the way things were with viewers at points in the future.


Photographer Ida Wyman has a natural inclination toward this, and an exhibition of her work, The Chords of Memory, runs through May 4 at the James Watrous Gallery.


Wyman, a photojournalist turned artist, was raised in New York City, where she photographed the world around her starting as a teenager. She began her career in the 1940s, a time when men dominated the field, working at Manhattan’s Acme Newspictures before becoming a successful freelance photographer for Life, The New York Times, Collier’s, Fortune and other publications—from 1947 to 1951, she took on nearly one hundred assignments for Life alone! Now eighty-seven years old, she lives here in Madison.


The exhibition features a rich mix of mostly black and white images, many of them new prints from Wyman’s work during the 1940s and ’50s. A wide range of subjects are represented—children at play, city street scenes, people at work, men and women in their homes, rural scenes and more—but each photograph reveals Wyman’s knack for imbuing a sense of dignity and authenticity into regular people and everyday life.
“Showing ordinary people in their everyday activities is what interested me the most,” the artist is quoted in the exhibition. “Dignity and respect to my subjects have been just as important to me as a well-composed photo.”








Notes from Wyman are included with many of the photographs in the show. For instance, alongside “Girl with Hat and Chalk Lines, The Bronx, NYC, 1947,” an image of a child bent over to draw on the sidewalk, Wyman comments that the scene brought back memories of her own childhood in which “Life was in the streets.”


While her photographs take viewers to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Mexico, the Midwest and beyond, many are set within New York City, with it busy streets often serving as a setting.


Children, too, provide a thread through the show. In “Bleacher Boys—Yankee Stadium, The Bronx, NYC, 1944,” a row of five boys sit on bleachers watching a baseball game, their coats, hat and mitt resting in front of them. And “Checking Out the Game, Philadelphia, 1948” shows five kids huddled around a cement stoop playing a game.


Rounding out the exhibition are four cases holding photos of Wyman, books her photography is featured in and samples of her work for Life.
A blend of personal and historic perspectives, of photojournalism and art, The Chords of Memory offers a thoughtful and compelling introduction to the talented Wyman.


On the other side of the James Watrous Gallery, Kevin Miyazaki also explores memories and history with a keen curiosity in Camp Home.


The photographer opens his exhibition with “A Guide to Modern Camp Homes: 10 New Models & Plans to Persons of Japanese Ancestry,” a book inspired by a 1940s Sears, Roebuck and Company guide of modern home models. It’s a “fictional but factual” publication that examines the living conditions that displaced Japanese Americans encountered before and during World War II. Miyazaki uses pleasant commercial language to describe the barracks that served as internment camps.





Miyazaki also offers sixteen photographs from his Camp Home series, in which he documents the interment camps in northern California and northwest Wyoming—where members of his father’s family were forced to live during the war—that have since been adapted into homes, barns and other buildings.


His photographs reveal the corrugated metal siding of a building, a doorway opening to a field and small details such as a welcome sign on a front door, a tape measure nailed to a board and names carved into a wooden wall.




































No humans are included in his compositions, yet the artist approached the owners of the buildings before taking his photographs. Says Miyazaki, “I’m seeking family history—both my own and that of the current owners—and time is often spent sharing our own uniquely American stories. Family histories intersect and are connected by the history of those buildings and by the lives lived within their walls.


The Chords of Memory and Camp Home run through May 4 at the James Watrous Gallery. For more information, visit wisconsinacademy.org.




Photos courtesy of the James Watrous Gallery

New York City's Sidewalk Clock

Ida Wyman: Sidewalk Clock, New York City, 1947

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951, currently on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through March 25, includes several photographs by Ida Wyman.

Her photograph of the sidewalk clock, located at the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan,  was written about in the Photo Hunt blog recently:

"Ida Wyman took great advantage of this unique object for her 1947 photograph Sidewalk Clock, an image that captures the spirit of women’s progress in postwar America. In it, a professional woman in stockings and high heels marches confidently across the frame. The woman is in sharp focus, while the enigmatic clock appears hazy, as if it can barely keep pace with her. Wyman herself was enjoying a successful career as a freelance photographer when she took the picture. Following in the footsteps of acclaimed photojournalists Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Berenice Abbott, she published her pictures in popular magazines such as Life, Fortune, and The Saturday Evening Post, an early joiner to the ranks of professional women photographers."

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951

The Photo League students take their camera anywhere . . . they want to tell us about New York and some of the people who live there . . . there was almost a sense of desperation in the desire to convey messages of sociological import.”
Beaumont Newhall, 1948

Via The Jewish Museum
In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947



Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy,
New York, 1949

Photographing the City
Members rejected the prevailing style of modernism in order to engage the gritty realities of urban life. Leaguers focused on New York, and this meant looking closely at ordinary people. That impulse spurred the group to explore neighborhoods, street by street, camera at the ready.

The League and Its Legacy
A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where you learned about yourself. One of its leading members was Sid Grossman who pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to the medium. By its demise in 1951, the League had propelled documentary photography from factual images to more challenging ones--from bearing witness to questioning one’s own bearings in the world.

Mason Klein
Curator, The Jewish Museum, New York

Catherine Evans
Curator, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Jack Manning (American, 1920-2001)
Elks Parade, 1939, from Harlem Document, 1936–40
Gelatin silver print
10 1/16 x 13 in. (25.6 x 33 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, 2008-95
© Estate of Jack Manning


Sid Grossman (American, 1913-1955)
Coney Island, c. 1947
Gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 7/8 in. (23.8 x 20 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift, 2008-62
© Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (24.1 x 24.1 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund, 2008-90



The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 has been organized by The Jewish Museum, New York and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.

The exhibition is made possible by a major grant from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Betsy Karel.

The exhibit opens November 4, and runs through March 25, 2012 and will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

See related article here

See related slideshow here

Ida Wyman's photographs are included in the exhibition

Ruth Orkin's photographs are included in the exhibition

APRIL 12, 1945: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT DIED

Ida Wyman: Men of the Garment District Read of President Roosevelt's Death, NYC, 1945

On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head." He then slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom. The president's attending cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, diagnosed a massive  cerebral hemmorrhage. At 3:35 pm that day, Roosevelt died.

Ed Clark: Navy CPO Graham Jackson Playing "Going Home" as President Roosevelt's Body is Carried, Warm Springs, GA, April 13, 1945

On the morning of April 13, Roosevelt's body was placed in a flag-draped coffin and loaded onto the presidential train. After a White House funeral on April 14, Roosevelt was transported back to Hyde Park by train, guarded by four servicemen from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. Roosevelt was buried in the Rose Garden of the Sprinwood Estate, the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park on April 15.

Roosevelt's death was met with shock and grief across the U.S. and around the world. His declining health had not been known to the general public. Roosevelt had been president for more than 12 years, longer than any other person, and had led the country through some of its greatest crises to the impending defeat of Nazi Germany and to within sight of the defeat of Japan as well.


Less than a month after his death, on May 8, came the moment Roosevelt fought for: V-E Day.

An editorial by The New York Times declared, "Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House."

thewhitehouse.gov: Franklin D. Roosevelt