Book Review: New York in the Sixties

City panorama

I recently came across two Dover books I hadn't looked at for years, this one and Peter Fink's New York Nocturnes. Lehnartz book, with 159 photos, is the better of the two with an interesting and quite broad selection of city life. Street scenes, culture, ethnic neighborhoods, transport, the docks, buildings, bridges and all shot during a month in 1968. I thought the street photos the most interesting though not up to the creative quality of the great Andreas Feininger. He and Lehnartz, both from central Europe, take a very objective view of the city rather than the subjective style of the New York School folk in the forties and fifties.

The problem with the book is the poor reproduction quality; the 133 screen is hardly adequate to capture the rich blacks and grey detail evident in many of the photos. The layout also is more of a picture/text book format which doesn't help the images either. If it was republished today with quality duotones on a good matt art with one photo a page it would certainly be a book worth having.

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