Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories
Frank Oscar Larson (1896-1964) was born in
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, of Swedish immigrant parents and lived in
Flushing, Queens most of his life. As an adult, Larson spent his days at
a branch of the Empire Trust Company (now Bank of New York Mellon),
working his way up through the ranks from auditor to vice-president, and
spare time on weekends taking photographs of street life throughout New
York City. He was an accomplished photographer who eloquently
documented 1950s Chinatown, the Bowery, Hell’s Kitchen, City Island,
Times Square, Central Park, and much more. This exhibition is compiled
from thousands of negatives recently discovered stored away in his
daughter-in-law’s house in Maine in 2009. Soren Larson, his grandson and
a television news camera man and producer, has been scanning and
printing the 55 year old images found stored in over 100 envelopes
filled with mostly medium format, 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ negatives, and neatly
noted by location and date in Larson’s own hand.
According to Soren Larson, “Photographs dating back to the 1920s
attest to the fact that he was always the family shutterbug. But it
wasn’t until the early 1950s that Frank’s passion for photography
blossomed. By 1949 both of his sons had left home, and perhaps this new
situation, no longer having kids at home freed him up on the weekends to
delve into photography with a passion.” For the next ten years, weekend
expeditions around New York with his beloved Rolleiflex Automat Model 4
camera around his neck, produced thousands of images which he developed
in a basement darkroom. Some were printed and entered in photography
competitions where he won awards, but most remained undiscovered until
the cardboard box of negatives that had been packed away since Frank’s
death in 1964, was found.
Larson was an avid, empathetic observer of the life of the streets,
and in his eyes, the mundane becomes miraculous. Larson documents the
changing face of New York City in
Under the El, Park Row,
perhaps a subtle self portrait taken in a dramatically composed
photograph under the El just prior to its being demolished. Times Square
and Chinatown were some of his favorite haunts, at once photogenic and
atmospheric, alluring and even alien. Times Square was notoriously
illuminated by countless numbers of incandescent light bulbs on the
theater marquees and advertising signs. A state of “permanent daylight”
made the use of flash unnecessary at night, allowing the photographer
to merge into the crowd. Larson achieved a great intimacy and immediacy
in unguarded, candid shots such as the evocative, worm’s eye view of
Johnny Guitar 1 taken in front of the Brandt’s Mayfair theater showing
the film of the same title starring Joan Crawford, and the eerie Ticket
Booth at the Brandt Lyric theater, the ticket taker’s face neatly framed
in a small round hole in the curved glass booth, masked with dark
sunglasses against the blinding lights.
The everyday person is honored in candid portraits of “working
stiffs” — policemen, shoe repair men and shoeshine boys, chefs,
painters, souvenir and balloon sellers, and husky men hoisting beer
barrels – as honest an appraisal of the human condition as any
photograph taken by Walker Evans, Atget, Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott
or Brassai. In Grand Central Station’s waiting room, a father muses
with a doll and boxed gifts next to him on the bench, reveal a solitary
moment in the urban maelstrom of rush hour in Midtown. Portraits of
children at play in Flushing or Williamsburg recall familiar images by
Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus in their fresh directness. Other striking
and timeless images such as
AP Window show business men huddled
in front of the day’s news at the AP Building at Rockefeller Center in
1955, taken just blocks away from Larson’s daily work at the Empire
Trust Company, while in
School Girls, four pretty young women relax outside in an intimate, almost vulnerable portrait.
Personal memorabilia and family photographs include a charming shot
of Larson’s sons, Franklin and David, taken at the Kodak Pavilion at the
1939 New York World’s Fair where they are posed for the “Kodak moment”
with a miniature Trylon and Perisphere. Sadly, on the way to visit the
New York World’s Fair in 1964, Larson suffered a stroke and passed away,
of complications suffered in WWI due to exposure to mustard gas as a
young man.
Larson’s own camera equipment – two Rolleiflex Automat Model 4
cameras using 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ medium format film, lens, filters and light
meter, will be included in the exhibition as well.
The extraordinary body of work in
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories
is having its New York debut at the Queens Museum of Art. In addition,
The Queens Museum of Art is honored to have been selected to receive a
donation of prints from Frank Oscar Larson’s photographic archive for
their permanent collection. We are pleased to exhibit sixty images in
this introduction to New York audiences in February 2012.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories has been curated by Louise Weinberg, Archives Manager.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories is supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.
