Take a picture here, Steal a Souvenir

SARATOGA SPRINGS - There is something about black-and-white photographs in the hands
of a capable photographer like Anna Kaufman Moon that capture the soul of people in a way that no other medium is able to do.
Perhaps it is the way the shadows redefine the landscape and architecture, or how light falls across an unblemished child's face.

Brooklyn-born Anna Kaufman Moon lived in New York City for 50 years before moving to the Capital Region a little more than a decade ago. In 1963, she purchased a camera.

New York City in the 1960s was a socially, politically and artistically volatile time.
"In the midst of all this, millions in the city continued to work, play, learn, exist - in hope or hopelessness," Moon writes in the introduction to her recently published book "Reflections of New York City 1963 to 1972."
"Through these times and places I wandered with my camera snapping, on impulse..."

Moon will be at Craven Books on Broadway Saturday to sign copies of her book.

"I got this little Japanese camera. It had this sort of idiot-brain, built-in meter, where you lined up the arrows;" she says. "I didn't understand it at all, but I got some very strong pictures with it.

"I was working a 9-to-5 job, I think I was making about $95 a week, and I started walking around Washington Square Park taking pictures and getting excited to see how they came out," she says.

The images depict the split dichotomy of a city-born childhood. There is innocent play in an urban jungle. Games of baseball are framed by the background of a boarded-up tenement; and children ride, like cowboys of a gas-powered age, on the back of a city bus bumper shielded from the driver's view.

There are visual slogans of an age: the word "Strike" etched in freehand over the grimy and soot-filled tiles of the 2nd Avenue subway station in a photograph from 1967. There is the detached gaze of subway car strap-hangers in a photo from 1964. There is the bustle of urban entrepreneurs, of hot dog vendors and pretzel hawkers wheeling their carts through the streets, and shoeshine boys setting up their stands.

There is also the warmth of a man cradling a child in 1963. The child is sleeping in his big arms, unaware of the noisy subway car barreling down the track.

Moon took photographs during a 1968 conflict between a Brooklyn school board and the United Federation of Teachers union that would accidentally start her career in earnest.

"I happened to see these women in Manhattan," she says. A section of her book documents the happenings in the Oceanhill-Brownsville School District at the time.
"Later that evening they called me and invited me to come to the school. There were reporters from Life and Newsweek and The New York Times, but I was the only photographer there. I wandered around. After I got home, the Times called and they said 'we'll develop those pictures for you.' And then a little light went off. So I called Life, and then Newsweek and said, "I took these pictures, are you interested in them?' "

From an upstairs neighbor, Moon learned that Abbie Hoffman was working on a book. The neighbor connected Moon with the notorious Yippie. "I had heard him on the radio and he sounded like a pretty loose and casual (person)," she says.

After she met him, she says, "He was all business. He knew where he wanted all the situations and the set-ups and the locations." She ended up doing most of the photography for the published work of Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book."

During that volatile era, she was helped by the fact that "New York City people don't usually make eye contact. It was helpful in taking pictures, and mostly I was off the beaten track," Moon recalls. These were images of chess games being played in city parks, men playing bocce ball, others feeding pigeons.

Moon captured the World Trade Center "under construction 1971," even as an old Avenue B vaudeville house marquee was coming down.

Moon put her book together in 2002, she says, with the help of a lot of people. "I had a lot of fun putting the book together. I had 30 or more stacks of photographs with different subjects, and I would shuffle them around," she says.

For her next project, Moon is looking into publishing possibilities. What she would like to do next is a collaboration of past and present.

"I bought a motor scooter and traveled across the U.S. for two months in 1957, from British Columbia to New York, and kept a daily diary. I'm just reading it over now and it makes a great adventure. It's a pretty extensive journal.

"I would like to follow that same trail today that I took then and combine contemporary photographs with the descriptions of the past,"she says.

Time and funding will tell, she says, whether the project becomes a reality or an unfulfilled fantasy.

Humanity's timelessness captured in a frozen black and white image. An elderly couple hand-in-hand strolling, he with a walking cane and she with a tough European exterior, scarf wrapped around her head, long formless skirt. directly next to a young couple stylishly dressed cuddling on a park bench both images from 30 years ago made even more poignant than just their starkness when you realize that the young couple is now close to the age of the more mature ones in the photograph and the older ones have in all probability no longer with us.

Captured in Moon's images, capturing a split second in time that will never be repeated or seen quite that way ever again.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
The Saratogian, 2003