Photographs Featuring Coca-Cola Branding and Signage

Prepared for Ted Ryan & Ginny Van Winkle

Harold Feinstein

Harold Feinstein was born in Coney Island in 1931. He began his career in photography in 1946 at the age of 15 and within four short years, Edward Steichen, an early supporter, had purchased his work for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He joined the Photo League at 17 and became a prominent figure in the vanguard of the early New York City street photography scene where he exhibited at Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery and was a designer for historic Blue Note Records. He was one of the original inhabitants of the legendary “Jazz Loft,” which he later turned over to his long-time collaborator and colleague W. Eugene Smith.

Feinstein is best known for his six-decade engagement with Coney Island. While his Coney Island work has been much celebrated, Feinstein’s breadth and exposure are far greater. His photographs from the Korean War, taken from the perspective of a draftee, offer an intimate look at the daily life of young conscripts from induction, to basic training, to the front lines. In addition, he has a large collection of classic street photography, nudes, portraits and still life. His first black and white monograph, Harold Feinstein: A Retrospective, was published in 2012 by Nazraeli Press and won a Photo District News 2013 award in the Best Photo Books category.

Feinstein’s photographs have been exhibited in and are represented in the permanent collections of major museums around the globe including the Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, Museum of Photographic Arts, Center for Creative Photography, Musée d’Art Moderne, the Jewish Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York. His portfolios, photo essays, and articles have been published in major periodicals including, LIFE, Aperture, Black and White, Camera Arts, The New York Times Magazine, American Photo, Oprah Magazine, Evergreen Review, Photography Annual, Modern Photography and Popular Photography.

Paul Schutzer

LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer died in the Middle East on June 5, 1967, at the age of 37, the first day of the Arab-Israeli war. He died in the Negev Desert when the Israeli half-track carrying him was hit by a 57-mm Egyptian shell. He was covering an Israeli-Egyptian armored battle, traveling in one of the leading vehicles advancing across the Gaza Strip.

When Schutzer was 10 years old, he starting shooting photographs with a broken camera he found in a waste basket in Brooklyn, NY. Years later, after studying to he a painter, then a lawyer, he realized that what he really wanted to do was shoot photographs.

Photography of the human experience became Schutzer’s preoccupation. In 1956 he joined LIFE’s Washington bureau and that began his short-lived hut fruitful career.

Although his life span was tragically short, Paul had seen and photographed much of the world, and much of what he saw appeared in the pages of his magazine: the Berlin Wall, the earthquake in Iran, the Algerian War, Nixon in South America, Kennedy through his campaign onto his funeral, Cuba and Castro, Lebanon, and Vietnam. Schutzer won several national photojournalism awards, including the University of Missouri’s News Photographer of the Year Award in 1959 and the George Polk Award for foreign coverage in 1958. He often accepted dangerous assignments. A colleague said Schutzer had “almost too much courage.”

Ed Clark

Ed Clark (July 3, 1911, Nashville, Tennessee – January 22, 2000, Sarasota, Florida) was a photographer who worked primarily for Life magazine. His best remembered work captured a weeping Graham W. Jackson, Sr. playing his accordion as the body of the recently deceased President Franklin D. Roosevelt was being transported to Washington, DC.
His work came to the notice of Life, which made him a stringer in 1936. A 1942 photograph of World War I hero Alvin York registering for the “old man’s draft” brought a job offer, but he turned it down; “I was raising two young boys, and New York didn’t seem like the place to raise them,” he later explained. However, he changed his mind, becoming a staff photographer in 1944, after Life allowed him to remain in Tennessee for a few years.

In 1945, he was temporarily assigned to the Paris offices. At the Nuremberg Trials, Clark photographed Hermann Göring.

In 1948, a series of photographs documented the gross inequality in educational resources allocated to white versus black children in the West Memphis School District of Arkansas; a single teacher had 100 black students, crammed into a single classroom. The Life story led to the construction of a new building for them.

That same year, Clark was assigned to the Los Angeles bureau, where he became acquainted with Hollywood stars. He was the only photographer invited to the wedding reception of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Around 1950, a friend told him of a “hot tomato” who had just signed with Twentieth Century-Fox. He took a series of pictures of a then unknown Marilyn Monroe which were not published at the time; much later, they came to light during a search of Life’s archives.

He was also in the good graces of presidents. He took a portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower using a Mathew Brady camera. On Eisenhower’s last day as President, Clark was the only photographer permitted in the Oval Office. Another memorable photo showed then Senator John F. Kennedy spending time with his baby daughter Caroline. The Kennedys were so pleased with the result that it hung in the Oval Office after he was elected, and Jackie Kennedy asked for 75 copies.

In 1955, Clark received an unexpected invitation from the Soviet Union. He became the first Western photographer allowed behind the Iron Curtain in 30 years. The same year, Edward Steichen included his work in MoMA’s blockbuster, world-touring The Family of Man exhibition, seen by more than 9 million viewers.

Due to budgetary cutbacks, Life let go a third of its photographic staff in 1963, Ed Clark among them. By then, his vision had become impaired due to a cataract.

Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner (November 7, 1922 – October 13, 2016)[1] was an American photographer of the 20th century whose work included streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets. Starting in 1947, Stettner photographed the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. He continued to photograph New York and Paris up until his death.

Marvin Newman

Marvin E. Newman (b.1927) was born and raised in the Bronx and attended Brooklyn College where he studied sculpture and photography with Walter Rosenblum. In 1948, Newman briefly joined the Photo League where he took classes with John Ebstel. He moved to Chicago in 1949 to study at the Institute of Design with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. After obtaining his degree in 1952, Newman moved back to New York City. The following year, his work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Always the Young Stranger” (1953).

Newman has authored or coauthored eight books on the subject of photography. His work has appeared in many publications, including Sports Illustrated, Life, Look, Newsweek, and Smithsonian. In 1983, he served as the national president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. He was the recipient of the Lucia Award for his achievements in sports photography in 2009. Notably, his work was included the celebrated exhibition Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League 1936-1951, which was shown at the Jewish Museum in New York, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach between 2012 and 2013.

Alfred Wertheimer

In 1956 freelance photographer Alfred Wertheimer was assigned to photograph a 21-year-old singer whom RCA was promoting. It was Elvis Presley, a name the 26-year-old Wertheimer did not recognize when he trekked down to New York City’s Studio 50 (later to be named the Ed Sullivan Theater) to photograph Presley’s appearance on Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey’s Stage Show.

At the time, Elvis had already recorded “Heartbreak Hotel” and was beginning to gain some notoriety, but he was nowhere close to becoming a cultural icon. He could still walk the streets unrecognized, without entourage and bodyguards, so Alfred Wertheimer was able to shoot reams of film of Elvis, up close and personal, both on stage and off, in the last remaining months before Elvis’s life would change forever. A series of extraordinary photographs document this brief moment in time when the 21-year-old Elvis Presley was on the cusp of national stardom.

Manhattan is a sensory overload. As any visitor knows, it is easy to be staggered by the canyons of man-made buildings, and the raucous torrent of life that runs through them. It is this intense vitality that has made New York the muse of many of the 20th century’s great artists. From photographers like Charles Sheeler and Berenice Abbott, who celebrated its architectural feats as symbolic of progress, to those who recorded the price of modernity as reflected in the activities of its underworld, like painter Edward Hopper and photographer Weegee, almost every artist comes to New York to try their hand at success.

It is a city that love it or hate it tows you in: and this is reflected in the work of generations of artists, from those like Charles Sheeler and Berenice Abbott, who celebrated its architectural feats as symbolic of progress, to those who recorded the price of modernity as reflected in the activities of its underworld, like Edward Hopper and Weegee. Almost everyone comes toNew York to try their hand at success.

One day in 1956, a young man from the South came to New York to bring his music to a wider audience. This man, who was himself a force to be reckoned with, was as yet unknown outside of the South. He had come to play on Stage Show, a CBS program produced by brothers and big band leaders, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

A series of extraordinary photographs document this brief moment in time when the 21-year-old Elvis Presley was on the cusp of national stardom.

Alfred Wertheimer, a young photojournalist who had grown up in Brooklyn and attended Cooper Union, would go on to spend around 10 days with Elvis over the next two years, and shoot roughly 2,500 photographs.

These intimate photographs of Elvis are a product of Wertheimer’s artistic brilliance and the history of photography. Wertheimer documented pivotal moments in the creation of rock and roll, the musical genre that would take over the world, and defined the stylings of rock-and-roll photography to come.