The car has become the carspace,
the protective and aggressive shell,
of urban and suburban man.
Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964)

KEITH DE LELLIS GALLERY is pleased to present an exhibition of vintage automobile photographs by American photographer Simpson Kalisher (born 1926). This exhibition features over 35 images captured in New York and its environs between 1949 and 1971.

Cars figure prominently in the corpus of photographic work that Bronx-born photographer Simpson Kalisher began to produce in the late 1940s. One of his best-known images (Untitled, Boy Pushing Car, 1959) is a moving portrait of a disaffected youth: his cigarette dangles from his lower lip as he pushes his gas-thirsty car along the side of a rain-slicked roadway. This show contains dozens of equally compelling pictures of the car in mid-century America.

Following World War II, the car became an increasingly integral part of American life and culture—from the interstate to the inner city. Kalisher’s pictures tell the epochal story of a culture embodied, inhabited, and obsessed by the automobile. In the same arc of time that Kalisher matured as an artist, the nation’s art, film, literature, and music became infused with this supreme symbol of consumerism. Like other photographers of his generation, Kalisher focused on this icon, which cut across class and social lines, but he did so with an innovative artistic touch that could transform a gritty, edgy moment into something surprisingly appealing, clean, and modern.

His gift lies in his ability to translate a split-second moment into a story. While some of his images treat the car as an object of light, mood, and texture, others have the verve and wit of a New Yorker cartoon. One such picture is a shot from 1960: an obviously bored family sits in traffic, oblivious to the “Ban the Bomb” rally in the background, their expressionless faces hidden behind dark sunglasses. Drawing from his work as a leading commercial photographer for corporate America, he employed a classically honed ability to transform the workaday into a work of art: in the eye of his camera, the lifeless car was a vibrant new “surface” to be photographed and exploited for its aesthetic value.

In a sense, Kalisher—(perhaps) unknowingly—followed Nabakov’s suggestion on how to use the car as a narrative device: “break the body of the car into separate curves and panels; then put it together in terms of reflections.