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11/18/2015 07:30 AMThis is a once upon a time story. Once upon a time to take a picture, you needed a camera, not a cell phone. Once upon a time you needed film, not a charger. Once upon a time, you took the film to a drug store and had it developed. Only when you picked up the photos in a sealed envelope could you see what they looked like.
Steve Nadler of Essex remembers those once-upon-a-time days of cameras slung by straps around the neck. That’s how he started taking pictures and some of those pictures are on exhibit at a show, A Moment in Time, at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester through Jan. 27, 2016.
Steve captured a world that is as long gone as film and the box camera: New York’s Little Italy in 1976, an area then made up of about 50 city blocks in lower Manhattan. Now, Little Italy is a much smaller area centered on Mulberry Street and populated as much by tourists as by locals. Most of the people Steve photographed have died; their children, he says, have moved to Staten Island and New Jersey.
Steve began the Little Italy sequence for a photography class at the New School for Social Research. The instructor asked the students to do a sustained project rather than individual pictures. Steve, who grew up in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, decided he would do a classic Jewish neighborhood that spoke to his own background: the Lower East Side. His instructor, however, had another idea.
“He said I should do a neighborhood I didn’t know.”
And so with his Mamiya C330 slung around his neck, Steve began to look for ways to capture the essence of Little Italy with a camera.
Scouting locations on Mulberry Street on a Saturday morning, he found John Esposito’s butcher shop—not simply a place to buy meat, but a place for the men of the neighborhood to hang out.
“The men came in on Saturday morning; their wives had kicked them out of the house because they were doing the floors. They were dressed up, a fedora and an overcoat,” Steve remembers.
Steve photographed Esposito and his extended family, the butcher shop crowd, and the people to whom they introduced him. Some people were ready to pose for the camera immediately. Others were hesitant at first.
“In those days people were wary of you when you came with a camera,” he says.
Sometimes he took his three-year-old son Jason with him on Saturday mornings because having the youngster helped break the ice.
The resulting photographs capture not only the individual faces but the spirit of a community suspended between its immigrant roots and the promise of America. There is a shot of young men climbing a greased telephone pole to get to the stack of money on top, once part of Little Italy’s annual San Gennaro Festival. The year after Steve took the picture, the greased pole contest was abandoned.
“It was too dangerous. They thought someone would break their neck,” Steve says.
A group shot of women on the street shows the gulf between an old-school mother and the next generation. The young women, with not a hair out of place in their bouffant coifs, are wearing high heels and slacks, as women’s pants were called in those days. Their fashionable purses dangle on their arms. Some are posing at a three-quarters angle for the most flattering camera shot. But at the end of the row sits an older, more solid woman, in a dress, not slacks, with her dark hair pulled back at the sides of her head. She is staring straight out at the photographer, her handbag clutched in her lap.
Perhaps the most arresting photo in the upcoming show is one of six teenagers, boys about to be men, their cockiness and vulnerability as visible as their jeans and undershirts.
“It was a pain in the neck getting all of them to pose,” he says.
Steve, whose professional career was in marketing, has lived with his wife Jill in Essex for some 30 years and has had shows of his photographs at the libraries in Essex and Old Lyme. He has also taught photography courses for the Old Lyme Library and Deep River Parks & Recreation Department. Chester resident Carol LeWitt saw several of the Little Italy photos at a local show and suggested the possibility of a show at the Italian American Museum, established in 2001 in Little Italy. The exhibit, from July to the end of September this year, found a receptive audience.
“It was supposed to last six weeks; it lasted three months,” Steve says.
The children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of his subjects came to see the photographs of their relatives. One visitor, Steve recalls, burst into tears when he saw a portrait of his best friend’s father who had recently died.
As he looks back on taking pictures of what he initially thought would be a world unrelated to his own, Steve marvels that the Little Italy he photographed turned out to be so similar to his upbringing in Brooklyn.
“I know about the immigrant experience. It resonated with me; family, education; all immigrants went through the same thing,” he says.
Steve got his first camera, a box Argus as a present from his grandfather when he was in 6th grade, but says he had stopped taking pictures and had only started again shortly before the Little Italy project. Some 40 years later, the project still remains vivid in his mind. He even remembers the nicknames of some of the people he photographed.
“Mush, Dindo, Joey Butch, everybody had a nickname,” he says.
There is, however, one thing he does not remember: the grade his instructor gave him on the photo project.
“I guess it must have okay,” he says.
A Moment in Time: The People of Little Italy in l976
Photographs by Steve Nadler
Runs through Jan.27, 2016, at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, 55 East Kings Highway, Chester. An opening reception is on Sunday, Dec. 6 from 2 to 5 p.m. For more information, call 860-526-8920.