America Worked: The 1950s Photographs of Dan Weiner

by William A. Ewing and Dan Weiner

Book Overview

A collection of photographs on the United States during the 1950s from the work of one of the best photojournalists of the time. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810911779
• ISBN13: 9780810911772
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"What makes this country great is the creation of wants and desires"

The heading above is from Vance Packard's 1957 book 'The Hidden Persuaders' quoted on page 140 of America worked. Throughout this interesting book of photos there are other quotes, mostly from Fortune magazine (who Weiner frequently worked for) which have been chosen to tie-in with the images and they help to give the pages an extra punch. I think the photos really do capture the feel of the white, middle class, suburb living, conformist, nuclear families of the fifties, who were, after all, the driving force of the economy. The chapter heads give a flavor of the contents: Prospects and promises; The hard sell; Organization man; A woman's world; Nuclear families; Success stories, for example. Weiner's camera looks in on the work and domestic life of these people without comment. The Organization man chapter is particularly revealing with just fifteen photos so much is said: corporate recruitment; trainees; sales meetings; the golf club; wives socializing; moving into a new suburb (Park Forest, Illinois is featured a lot throughout the book) and the last photo, the well known one of the commuters arriving home on the 4:51 from Chicago. The last chapter, The Lonely crowd I thought was rather out of place and maybe the photos of police work, a psychiatric hospital, a couple of Montgomery, Alabama from 1956, a NYC news vendor among others were to show the range of Weiner's assignments though this aspect of the fifties has really been summed up by Frank's The Americans. The design and production of the book is fine except for the glaring problem of the coarse screen used: 133! Most of the photos have plenty of detail that need to be seen and if the book was published in the last few years I bet it would be 200 to 250 and printed on a good matt art paper. ***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.