There is very sketchy information about the photographers responsible for the 35-40,000 images in the New York City Housing Authority negatives collection.

At first in 1933-34, a photographer was probably borrowed from the federal Public Works Administration to document the demolition of tenements carried out by the NYC Tenement House Department, precursor of NYCHA, which razed nearly 10,000 Old Law “slum” buildings at no cost to the landlords. It was the Depression and the workers were unemployed men collecting ‘relief’ from the federal government’s Emergency Relief Administration.

This is the sort of camera the NYCHA photographers used, a bulky 4x5-inch negative plate large-format probably in conjunction with a tripod. Pictured is the Speed Graphic.

The very first photographer whose name shows up in the Housing Authority documents collection is one of the most famous of the 20th century. Ironically, Walker Evans did not take photographs for the Authority but produced for exhibition a series of 11x17-inch prints of work done by the NYCHA cameramen. In 1935, he was on the brink of fame but short of money.

Click here to see the letter Walker Evans wrote to NYCHA chair Langdon Post.

The first NYCHA photographer named in the documents collection is Trubov in 1936, no first name. In 1944, Louis Marinoff is listed in the NYCHA Annual Report as “staff photographer” and he continued on the job for three decades, at least until 1974. Arthur Jacob came on board in 1951. Beginning in the 1970s, Thomas Balzano and John Ferrari worked as NYCHA photographers. Balzano continued into the 1990s. Other photographers in the latter part of the 20th century were Bob Adelman and Peter Mikoleski. Initially, photographers used the 4x5-inch and ocasionally the 8x10 negative format, then combined that with 6x9-cm in the late 1950s, eventually progressing to a fourth size in the 1960s, 35mm. The 4x5 was the most enduring format, lasting into the last decades of the 20th century.

The vast bulk of the photographs are by no means artistic, or even particularly interesting in terms of subject matter or execution. The job of the photographers was to capture the mundane, the prosaic — the sites to be razed, the demolitions, the construction in each gritty phase to verify that the builders and suppliers were living up to their contractual obligations, sewage pipes, boilers, wear and tear on project buildings over the years.

There was also a public relations need to capture the poverty of the slums and contrast it with the improved surroundings in brand-new public housing. Sometimes, they caught a real documentary look at life in New York City that approached the level of a Walker Evans or Berenice Abbott. The photographers sometimes caught a snapshot of the past thet can live in the present. Those images are in the exhibit.