The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives

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George Tames, Klan Rally, December 16, 1956, The New York Times, gelatin silver print, courtesy of the New York Times Photo Archives

Hula-hoops and air-raid drills, bold new fins on big new cars, Marilyn Monroe and Richard M. Nixon — these are a fraction of the news-making photographs of the 1950s captured by New York Times photojournalists. Half a century later, The Tumultuous Fifties revisits the newspaper’s vast collection to present an engaging portrait of this seminal period. Approximately two hundred vintage news photographs focus on a decade distinguished by such transforming cultural phenomena as McCarthyism, space travel, the civil rights movement, bebop and cool jazz, and Beat poetry. Augmenting the photographs, a group of iconic objects from the decade includes the rarely seen original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s groundbreaking Beat novel On the Road, and a legendary motorcycle: a 1951 Vincent Black Shadow.

The photographs are organized into categories such as politics, mechanization, the Cold War, celebrities, and everyday life. Many images focus on the upbeat: Milton Berle, drive-in movies, and glossy consumer goods like a shiny new iron modeled by a smiling housewife. Others document the era’s turbulent aspects: American soldiers in Korea, Nikita Krushchev and Fidel Castro, a strike at Bethlehem Steel, and police officers frisking “juvenile delinquents.” In one memorable photograph Pvt. Elvis Presley pops out of an Army tank in Germany, and in another a young black couple sits in the back of a bus under a sign reading “Colored.”

Organized by Douglas Dreishpoon ’76, curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and Alan Trachtenberg, Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, The Tumultuous Fifties premiered at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in January 2002.