Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

296 reMeMberING the SpaCe aGe
New York. though the volume of de Salignac’s work is impressive, the work
had been largely ignored through the 20th century. Only recently were his
photographs re-discovered, edited, and aforded a major exhibition at the
Museum of the City of New York and a book in 2007. 36
Made within a year of Strand’s “Wall Street 1915,” de Salignac’s “brooklyn
bridge 1914” portrait shows a group of painters randomly suspended along
the numerous ascending cables of the bridge, appearing like musical notes
in a composer’s score. this visualization of random or musical placement
reoccurs in a NaSa Lewis research photograph of two engineers working
with an oscilloscope connected to a scale model supersonic aircraft inside a
wind tunnel. In the black-and-white image random streaks of white light from
the multiple fash systems that illuminate the engineers and the model aircraft
bounce around the highly refective tunnel and its three circled windows.
again, this is an uncredited photograph made in 1957 with what I suspect was
a large format camera (typical for extensive detail). 37 the photograph evokes a
mid-20th century feel for communicating “high-tech men-at-work.” It does
so by posing the men (as is often the case) and then asking the two engineers
to do their work. In comparison to de Salignac’s (apparent) found moments of
(staged) randomness, the Lewis Center image is a visually compelling portrait
of the emerging era of aerospace, just as the de Salignac photograph is a portrait
of emerging urban infrastructure in america.
by the 1930s the evolution of the camera and the subsequent reduction in
the size and quality of flm revolutionized the look of news reporting and signaled
the emergence of the picture magazine. Magazines like Time, Life and Fortune
sprang up in competition to newspapers. along with this, photographers were
beginning to discover that they could access, experience, and interpret a range
of events and situations in unobtrusive ways with handheld cameras. 38 the result
was a new genre of photography called photojournalism—an approach in both
news gathering production and photographic documentation. Small, handheld
cameras like the 35 mm and 2 1/4 size were formidable tools with which to
discover more fuid, intimate, and strikingly visual opportunities between people
and place. the small camera created opportunities to tell a story, communicate
a point-of-view, or report an unfolding event in one or even in a group of
photographs (photographic essay). the small camera aforded the photographer
a means to enter new social and industrial worlds without lengthy planning
36. See New York Rises – Photographs by Eugene de Salignac (New York, NY, aperture foundation
and New York City Department of records/Municipal archives, 2007), with essays by Michael
Lorenzini and Kevin Moore.
37. See Glenn research Center GrC Image Net C1957-45670,“engineers Check body revolution
Model,” NaSa GrIN database number: GpN-2000-001473.
38. however, given the low grade quality of newsprint and photographic reproduction quality, large
format cameras were still commonly used to obtain extensive detail and sharpness.