Twenty-One Negatives

Evidence The dark-haired woman, fur piece over her shoulders, in front of a colossal nude male figure with his head thrown back and a hand cupped beside his mouth, standing on a sphere on a round drum ringed with smaller robed figures. Behind her a tractor train with an awning, lettered …HOUND and WORLD'S FA…. Trees in young leaf; long shadows.

Interpretation One of the Greyhound tractor trains that carried visitors around the 1939 New York World's Fair, which is what places the trip at Flushing Meadows. The figure is Leo Friedlander's Freedom of Speech, one of his four colossal plaster figures on Constitution Mall, the fair's main promenade: a period postcard of it shows the same shout at the sky, the same sphere under the feet and the same ring of listeners round the base, figure for figure. It was taken for Carl Milles's The Astronomer at first, which stood on a plain pier by the Lagoon of Nations and held its hands quite differently. The mall's roadway, flags and trees are all in the frame.

Evidence A woman in a plaid jacket and small round hat, a fur scarf, one hand flat against the corner of a wall of large square slate-grey tiles lettered BELGIUM on both faces. Tree shadows on the wall; a paved walk.

Interpretation The pavilion designed under Henry van de Velde, faced in Belgian slate. Its tower survives as the Belgian Friendship Building in Richmond, Virginia. Enlarged, the face and the lighter hair settle it: this is almost certainly the blonde, in a bigger check than the houndstooth the dark-haired woman wears elsewhere.

Evidence A young man in a fedora and a light double-breasted suit kissing the dark-haired woman at a boardwalk rail. A row of national flags at left; at right, a white stepped tower crowned by a figure holding a staff aloft. Across the foreground boards lies the long shadow of the person holding the camera: a hat and a coat.

Interpretation The tower is the Italian pavilion's: a stepped white pylon with the seated figure of Roma on top, spear in hand, and a waterfall that fell the whole height of its face into a pool. Seen from the side here, so the water does not show. The shadow is the shape of a woman wearing a hat: almost certainly the blonde, who is with the dark-haired woman in several other frames of the album.

Evidence The same young man, eyes shut against the sun and grinning, with the dark-haired woman looking up at him. Behind them an outdoor stage under a cantilevered oval roof set with downlights, folding chairs and microphone stands, birch trees, and a bed of tulips in flower. Two older women sit on a bench.

Interpretation Tulips in bloom put this in May. The architecture is the fair's streamline idiom. Which bandstand is not settled; the fair had several and the archives at the New York Public Library hold the drawings.

Evidence The dark-haired woman in a dark two-piece with a fur collar and gauntlet gloves, waving. A curved fountain bowl at left throwing jets into a basin, a boardwalk, a small pavilion with a striped conical roof, a great white cylinder with a round medallion, and a boulevard of flags.

Interpretation Somewhere on the fair's international side, near the Lagoon of Nations. Same hat and fur as the frame with the tall figure, so the same day.

Evidence The dark-haired woman in a pinstripe suit and fur, legs crossed, at a chrome-legged table under a striped scalloped umbrella. Two bottles with a script label reading Schaefer, a stemmed glass of beer, a purse, a coin purse and a book of matches. A second glass at the far side of the table: somebody else is sitting there.

Interpretation F. & M. Schaefer, the Brooklyn brewer, ran the Schaefer Center at the fair, with an open-air bar and a restaurant seating sixteen hundred at ten cents a glass. Tubular steel chairs and a striped umbrella are exactly its furniture.

Evidence The bow and name of RMS Queen Mary from the pier, hull in Cunard black, passengers crowding the forward rail, smoke from the first funnel. Taken from water level, looking up.

Interpretation She was in ordinary service until she reached New York on 5 September 1939, and left in grey war paint in March 1940. A black hull with steam up and people at the rail is a sailing day in 1939. Cunard's Pier 90 is at West 50th Street; the fair was a subway ride away.

Evidence The dark-haired woman in a checked dress with a fur piece, laughing, beside a man in a cream suit with an open collar and a pipe, seated on a stone seawall. Behind them a very long steamer with four tall funnels in a row, tiers of deck windows, a forward wheelhouse, smoke from all four stacks.

Interpretation Only one passenger ship on the Great Lakes ever carried four funnels: the Seeandbee of the Cleveland & Buffalo Transit Company, 500 feet, 1,500 passengers, nightly Cleveland to Buffalo from the East 9th Street pier, with summer cruises to Detroit and Chicago. In 1939 the company was being liquidated and she was sold to a Chicago concern. That she is under steam behind a promenade wall suggests a departure hour at Cleveland or Buffalo.

Evidence The pair again, standing. The man's thin moustache and receding temples are plain here; the pipe is clenched. The woman holds her hat and a dark bag. A pier lamp standard and the steamer's mast over the man's shoulder.

Interpretation Two frames of the same pose from the same spot: somebody was bracketing, or being asked to. Whoever pressed the shutter was a third person, and on this album's evidence the third person is usually the blonde.

Evidence A woman bent double, fixing a strap on her sandal, in the same checked dress as the seawall frames. Cars parked on grass, one a late-1930s sedan with a split grille, a tent-roofed building, pines. Focus missed entirely.

Interpretation The dress ties this to the ship day. A grassy parking ground with pines is a park or picnic grove, not a city pier. A candid, taken from behind, by someone who found it funny.

Evidence A man stripped to the waist, a fob chain hanging from his trouser pocket, squinting at the camera in front of the rounded tail of a sedan with a two-piece rear window. Another car alongside. Deep shade under trees.

Interpretation Compared face to face with the man on the seawall, this is him: same widow's peak, same deep temples, and the faint line of the same moustache. The chain says he came in a suit and took it off.

Evidence The same man, same car, now holding his shirt and a cap, a wristwatch on his left wrist.

Interpretation Two frames of him half-undressed and squinting. He is being photographed by somebody who is enjoying it.

Evidence A slim man in a white shirt and light trousers, bent double with his back to the camera, on grass between parked cars with whitewalls. Out of focus.

Interpretation The answer to the shoe frame: the same joke played back. The build suggests the man with the pipe.

Evidence A man in a white T-shirt and pale trousers kissing a dark-haired woman in a print dress who sits on a post, three strands of barbed wire between them and the camera, spruce trees behind. Soft focus.

Interpretation Clearly the man with the pipe. Evergreens and barbed wire are farm country north of the city, and the light is evening.

Evidence A blonde in a white dress, wide-brimmed hat and fur piece to the left of a painted board reading USA WORK PROGRAM WPA; to the right, mostly out of frame, a dark-haired woman in a dark jacket, plaid skirt and a hat with a veil. A wall of enormous dressed stone blocks behind.

Interpretation The Works Progress Administration put that sign on every project it built between 1935 and 1943. The blocks are a retaining wall or a park structure the WPA was still building. The two women posed on purpose, which says something about how they felt about the New Deal, or about the sign.

Evidence The dark-haired woman holding her veiled hat against the wind in a print dress; the blonde, in the same white dress and bow as the WPA frame, hat in hand, eyes narrowed. The same cut-stone wall at the edge. Both laughing.

Interpretation Same day and place as the WPA sign. The blonde appears to be the same woman who appears in several other photos from the collection, including the corner of Belgium.

Evidence The dark-haired woman in a belted houndstooth jacket, dark skirt, and a felt hat with a long pheasant feather, balanced on a plank laid over dry grass. Behind her a black sedan with pod headlamps, a divided grille of stacked horizontal bars, whitewalls, and a plate on the grille. Hazy hills and a treeline. The sharpest frame in the album.

Interpretation The grille and lamps are a 1937 or 1938 Buick. Brown grass and a wool suit are October. The plank is there because the ground was wet, which is why she is smiling at whoever put it down.

Evidence The same woman, same suit and feather, held close by the man with the pipe, in a dark suit and tie now. The Buick's grille fills the left of the frame. Orchard rows on the far slope.

Interpretation Same afternoon as the plank. Her cheek is against his and her hand is in his; this is not a family pose. The man with the pipe and the young man in the fedora are two different people, and across one year she is photographed kissing both.

Evidence The same woman, same suit and feather, on a suburban sidewalk in front of a brand-new flat-roofed house in the streamline style: white stucco, a roof deck with pipe railings, an integral two-car garage, a raw lot roped off with string. A builder's board reads BUILT BY, a name set on the diagonal, a telephone number, and an address line. A tree in full leaf.

Interpretation The board is blurred past reading even at full magnification; the original negative under a loupe might give the builder's name, and with it the town. Whoever she is, she has been driven out to look at a new house, and dressed for it.

Evidence Looking almost straight down through spruce and hardwoods to a road at the foot of a bluff, a strip of stony beach, and grey water to the horizon. No people.

Interpretation Big water with no far shore: one of the Lakes. The conifers and the bluff suggest the northern shores, Lake Huron or Superior, more than Erie. The one landscape in the album, taken by someone who climbed to get it.

Evidence A man in a three-piece suit with a pocket square, hand in pocket, grinning broadly, leaning on the white-spoked wheel of a First World War artillery piece mounted as a memorial beside a road. Trees bare; a utility pole; brown grass.

Interpretation Compared at full size with the pipe-smoker, this is a different man: a longer and leaner face, a fuller moustache, heavier brows, and hair that has not receded at the temples. A fifth person, in the only frame without leaves on the trees. Bare branches and a suit with no overcoat mean March or April, or November. Every American town park had a gun like this after 1919.