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QUEENS MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS
FRANK OSCAR LARSON: 1950s NEW YORK STREET STORIES
Recently Discovered Trove of Negatives Chronicles 1950s New York
Through the Lens of Unheralded Street Photographer
February 5 – May 20, 2012
(January 14, 2012, QUEENS, NY) – In recent years, the photography world has been astonished by the discoveries of remarkable troves of negatives never before seen. In 2007, 126 rolls of film known as “The Mexican Suitcase” resurfaced providing a new look at the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour. The 2007 revelation of 115,000 negatives by reclusive Chicago nanny Vivian Maier, forgotten in an unclaimed storage locker, created renewed interest in mid‐century street photography. And now, the Queens Museum of Art presents another trove, though more modest in scale, of several thousand historic negatives hidden from sight for 55 years. Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories presents 65 photographs that are at once universal and personal, endowed with a powerful compositional eye and a soulful ambiance taken by Larson, a Queens banker whose lifelong passion for photography yielded tremendous images of everyday life in 1950s New York. Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories is on view at the Queens Museum of Art February 5 – May 20, 2012.
Frank Larson (1896‐1964) was an accomplished amateur photographer who elegantly documented 1950s Chinatown, the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, Times Square, Central Park and much more in iconic images of familiar locations in this most nostalgic decade. The exhibition is selected from thousands of negatives discovered in Larson’s daughter‐in‐law’s home in 2009. The negatives, primarily medium format (2‐1/4 x 2‐1/4”), had been stored in more than 100 envelopes meticulously notated with location and date info in Larson’s own hand. Since their discovery, Larson’s grandson Soren has been overseeing the scanning and printing of the 55 year old images.
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 no longer having kids at home freed him up on the weekends to delve into photography with a passion.” Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Larson made weekend expeditions around New York with his Rolleiflex Automat Model 4 camera around his neck, producing 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 his death in 1964, was found.
“Larson was an avid, compassionate observer of the life of the streets, and in his eyes, the mundane became miraculous,” said QMA Archives Manager Louise Weinberg who curated the exhibition. “Whether he was capturing the electric atmosphere of Times Square or the ordinary policeman walking the beat, Larson provided as honest an appraisal of the human condition as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott or Brassai.”
Larson documented the changing face of New York City in Under the El, Park Row, 1953, perhaps a subtle self portrait taken in a dramatically composed photograph of architectural structures shadowed by the elevated train. Bookstore in Theatre Alley, Lower Manhattan, 1958, is a gorgeously evocative image of a little known alley behind Park Row, which lasted well into the 21st century and before sadly being demolished in 2010. Times Square and Chinatown were some of Larson’s favorite subjects, at once photogenic and atmospheric, alluring and somewhat alien. Times Square was notoriously illuminated by countless numbers of incandescent light bulbs on the theater marquees and advertising signs. This state of permanent daylight made the use of flash unnecessary at night, allowing Larson to merge into the crowds. Larson also achieved a great sense of immediacy in candid shots such as the distinctive camera angle of Johnny Guitar 1, 1954, taken in front of the Brandt’s Mayfair Theater showing the film of the same title starring Joan Crawford, and the eerie Ticket Booth in Times Square, 1954, 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, sewer workers, chefs, painters, souvenir and balloon sellers, and husky men hoisting beer barrels. In Man Waiting for a Train, early 1950s, Larson focuses on the waiting room in Grand Central station where a father muses with boxed gifts and a doll seated next to him on the bench, revealing a solitary moment in the urban cacophony of rush hour in midtown. Portraits of children at play in Kissena and Astoria Parks, on the streets of Williamsburg, or at the ball field in Central Park recall familiar images by Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus in their refreshing directness. Other striking, timeless images such as AP Window, 1955, show businessmen 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, 1953, Larson’s sympathetic eye reveals four young women in a private, relaxed moment.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories also includes personal memorabilia and family photographs including a charming shot of Larson’s sons 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. Larson’s own camera equipment – two Rolleiflex Automat Model 4 cameras, lens, filters and light meter, will be included in the exhibition as well.
About the Artist
Frank Oscar Larson (1896‐1964) was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, of Swedish immigrant parents. He served as an artillery man in World War I, and completed college upon his return from service. He married Eleanora Friberg, also a first generation Swedish immigrant from Greenpoint, and then moved to Flushing, Queens where they raised their two boys, Franklin and David. 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, for the next 40 years. To offset the drudgery of a 9 to 5 job, he escaped into the world of the imagination through playing the violin, wood carving and especially photography. He inculcated a love of art and its poetic mysteries in his sons, one of whom later became a painter. After the boys were grown, Larson spent his spare time on weekends for the next 16 years, taking photographs of street life throughout New York City. Sadly, on the way to visit the New York World’s Fair in 1964, he suffered a stroke and passed away, of complications suffered in WWI due to exposure to mustard gas which permanently damaged his lungs.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories has been curated by Louise Weinberg, QMA Archives Manager.
Website: www.queensmuseum.org Twitter😡queensmuseum
FRANK OSCAR LARSON: 1950s NEW YORK STREET STORIES
Recently Discovered Trove of Negatives Chronicles 1950s New York
Through the Lens of Unheralded Street Photographer
February 5 – May 20, 2012
(January 14, 2012, QUEENS, NY) – In recent years, the photography world has been astonished by the discoveries of remarkable troves of negatives never before seen. In 2007, 126 rolls of film known as “The Mexican Suitcase” resurfaced providing a new look at the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour. The 2007 revelation of 115,000 negatives by reclusive Chicago nanny Vivian Maier, forgotten in an unclaimed storage locker, created renewed interest in mid‐century street photography. And now, the Queens Museum of Art presents another trove, though more modest in scale, of several thousand historic negatives hidden from sight for 55 years. Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories presents 65 photographs that are at once universal and personal, endowed with a powerful compositional eye and a soulful ambiance taken by Larson, a Queens banker whose lifelong passion for photography yielded tremendous images of everyday life in 1950s New York. Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories is on view at the Queens Museum of Art February 5 – May 20, 2012.
Frank Larson (1896‐1964) was an accomplished amateur photographer who elegantly documented 1950s Chinatown, the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Hell’s Kitchen, Times Square, Central Park and much more in iconic images of familiar locations in this most nostalgic decade. The exhibition is selected from thousands of negatives discovered in Larson’s daughter‐in‐law’s home in 2009. The negatives, primarily medium format (2‐1/4 x 2‐1/4”), had been stored in more than 100 envelopes meticulously notated with location and date info in Larson’s own hand. Since their discovery, Larson’s grandson Soren has been overseeing the scanning and printing of the 55 year old images.
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 no longer having kids at home freed him up on the weekends to delve into photography with a passion.” Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Larson made weekend expeditions around New York with his Rolleiflex Automat Model 4 camera around his neck, producing 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 his death in 1964, was found.
“Larson was an avid, compassionate observer of the life of the streets, and in his eyes, the mundane became miraculous,” said QMA Archives Manager Louise Weinberg who curated the exhibition. “Whether he was capturing the electric atmosphere of Times Square or the ordinary policeman walking the beat, Larson provided as honest an appraisal of the human condition as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott or Brassai.”
Larson documented the changing face of New York City in Under the El, Park Row, 1953, perhaps a subtle self portrait taken in a dramatically composed photograph of architectural structures shadowed by the elevated train. Bookstore in Theatre Alley, Lower Manhattan, 1958, is a gorgeously evocative image of a little known alley behind Park Row, which lasted well into the 21st century and before sadly being demolished in 2010. Times Square and Chinatown were some of Larson’s favorite subjects, at once photogenic and atmospheric, alluring and somewhat alien. Times Square was notoriously illuminated by countless numbers of incandescent light bulbs on the theater marquees and advertising signs. This state of permanent daylight made the use of flash unnecessary at night, allowing Larson to merge into the crowds. Larson also achieved a great sense of immediacy in candid shots such as the distinctive camera angle of Johnny Guitar 1, 1954, taken in front of the Brandt’s Mayfair Theater showing the film of the same title starring Joan Crawford, and the eerie Ticket Booth in Times Square, 1954, 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, sewer workers, chefs, painters, souvenir and balloon sellers, and husky men hoisting beer barrels. In Man Waiting for a Train, early 1950s, Larson focuses on the waiting room in Grand Central station where a father muses with boxed gifts and a doll seated next to him on the bench, revealing a solitary moment in the urban cacophony of rush hour in midtown. Portraits of children at play in Kissena and Astoria Parks, on the streets of Williamsburg, or at the ball field in Central Park recall familiar images by Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus in their refreshing directness. Other striking, timeless images such as AP Window, 1955, show businessmen 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, 1953, Larson’s sympathetic eye reveals four young women in a private, relaxed moment.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories also includes personal memorabilia and family photographs including a charming shot of Larson’s sons 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. Larson’s own camera equipment – two Rolleiflex Automat Model 4 cameras, lens, filters and light meter, will be included in the exhibition as well.
About the Artist
Frank Oscar Larson (1896‐1964) was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, of Swedish immigrant parents. He served as an artillery man in World War I, and completed college upon his return from service. He married Eleanora Friberg, also a first generation Swedish immigrant from Greenpoint, and then moved to Flushing, Queens where they raised their two boys, Franklin and David. 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, for the next 40 years. To offset the drudgery of a 9 to 5 job, he escaped into the world of the imagination through playing the violin, wood carving and especially photography. He inculcated a love of art and its poetic mysteries in his sons, one of whom later became a painter. After the boys were grown, Larson spent his spare time on weekends for the next 16 years, taking photographs of street life throughout New York City. Sadly, on the way to visit the New York World’s Fair in 1964, he suffered a stroke and passed away, of complications suffered in WWI due to exposure to mustard gas which permanently damaged his lungs.
Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories has been curated by Louise Weinberg, QMA Archives Manager.
Website: www.queensmuseum.org Twitter😡queensmuseum
