A picture is worth a thousand words. Now, an innovative exhibition is bringing to life moments in theater in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s through a blend of art and technology. One of the images animates a Hell’s Kitchen street and the stars of the original West Side Story back in 1957.
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has unveiled an exhibition that reinvigorates the storied past of Broadway theater through the lens of the famed Friedman-Abeles photography studio. Entitled Reanimating Theater: The Photography of Friedman-Abeles, the exhibition, running from March 15 through September 25, 2024, employs lenticular printing to animate iconic photographs from Broadway’s golden era.
An exhibition’s highlight includes a series of shots of Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence, stars of the original West Side Story, captured running along a Hell’s Kitchen street. “This is one of the few images in the collection not taken on stage,” Doug Reside, the curator behind the project, notes. “The original promotional team took Kert and Lawrence out into the city, and they ran down streets on the Upper West Side and the photographers snapped their pictures. This street happens to be West 56th Street, as you can see from the trash can in the lower left-hand side of the photograph, but there is actually another photograph where they run down the opposite side of the street, and there are several photographs where they’re jumping off the rocks in Central Park.”
“This was the one, of course, that was used throughout the publicity for the show and has become representative of West Side Story as a property,” said Reside. “This scene was used not only on the original cast recording for the original production but was also recreated for the movie version and used in movie posters, particularly abroad. In the exhibition, we can see that original photograph reanimated through the joining of several different photographs from the collection.”
From 1954 to 1970, the Friedman-Abeles Studio was Broadway’s go-to photographer, capturing the vibrancy and spirit of shows like West Side Story, Camelot and Bye, Bye Birdie. Yet, despite their prolific output, the transition to digital has left many of their images unseen in their original color glory. The Library for the Performing Arts has digitized these treasures, bringing them to public view in an animated, printed format.
“Freidman-Abeles worked in a time before digital photography. Their photographs were taken using film and slides and were distributed on paper and in playbills and on record albums,” said Reside. “And so I looked back to a technology that was almost as old as photography itself: lenticular printing”
Reside elaborates that lenticular printing “allows several different images to animate as you move past them, giving life to these static moments much like a GIF would.” This technique not only showcases the movement inherent in theater but also unveils details lost in single, static images.
For anyone with a love for theater, history, or technology, this exhibition promises a unique journey back in time, reanimated for a modern audience. “I hope that visitors will enjoy this peek back into theater history,” Reside concludes, “reanimated now for both fans and researchers alike.”
Reanimating Theater: The Photography of Friedman-Abeles continues through to September 25 at the NYPL for Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023. They are open Monday to Saturday at 10:30am and close most days at 6pm, but have extended hours to 8pm on Monday and Thursday, closed on Sunday. More information at www.nypl.org/locations/lpa