The Nostalgia Artist

I wasn’t familiar with the name of photographer Clemens Kalischer at all before this weekend, but posters around Paris advertising USA: Années 50 (or USA: The Fifties) made me curious enough to bum-rush the show at the Robert Maison Doisneau de la Photographie musuem. Two floors of black-and-white shots from everyday life in the 1950s, USA: Années 50 brings to mind above all how fast things are moving in this postmodern age.

The space of time between the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age has brought in mad innovations. I take it all for granted, being born in 1970. It’s hard for me to even grasp that such tremendous, society-altering leaps (television, space travel, the Pill, the Internet, Viagra, etc.) weren’t par for the course at all in generations past. German-American shutterbug Clemens Kalischer used to shoot regularly for Life, Ploughshares, and Time and his work subtly evokes that sense of immense change.

The little details are the most telling. In one photo, a boy and his dog sitting on a brownstone stoop somewhere in New York recalls the innocence of the time just through the gnarled string tied to the dog’s collar. (As in, yeah, I guess that’s how dogs were tethered before all these omnipresent, auto-retractable Flexi Comfort All Belt™ leashes.) Another portrait in a store shows a cash register with huge typewriter-like buttons; modernization means never turning back from the laser-scanning minicomputers stocked in supermarkets worldwide nowadays. One shot in Manhattan shows the bulky sign for Gimbels (an old-school competitor of Macy’s, shut down in 1986) resting above the store’s entranceway. Could it be that it was all so simple then? Zadie Smith once said, “To be an ichabod is to be a nostalgia artist,” and that’s me all day I suppose. Love this Kalischer portrait of a young John Lee Hooker, taken at the legendary Music Inn.