- NY Tennis Club, 1950s
- Two sailors in the North End of Boston,
- Gas Station Cowboy, Arizona, 1952
- Street Corner, Manhattan From Above, 1938
- Stickball in the Bowery, 1938
- Catholic Mission Bowery, 1940
For more information contact Scott Berube – berubescott1@gmail.com
WALFRED MOISIO (1910-2002) NYC (1928-1952)
Walfred Moisio (1910 – 2002). For over three decades, Moisio dedicated his life to observing the ever-changing streets of New York City, candidly capturing the emotions of its people and time.
Born in 1910, Moisio grew up on a Massachusetts apple farm and from 1928-32 he put himself through Columbia University earning a fine arts degree in photography, in 1933 he moved to New York City to join the Emergency Relief Bureau in a position as photography instructor and later working for the likes of The New Yorker, Esquire, Time, Look, Harpers Bazaar, Vogue, and the New York Times.
Capturing a time of elegantly turned-out Wall Street businessmen and a magnificent burgeoning stone and steel skyline, contrasted by the impact of the great depression.
While contemporaries such as Alfred Stieglitz and Walker Evans influenced his work, what makes Moisio stand apart is both the quality of his observations and the fact that his work has scarcely ever been seen, until now.
Moisio’s street photography artfully captures many of the cultural and historical events of the 1930s and 40s, while presenting us with a wholly original point of view of New York.
Moisio’s ability to depict the essence of time and place within his honest and documentary style of photography is captivating. In this way he explored the social issues of the time. However, whilst you see casual traces of racial integration, sexuality and economic status, you do not feel he is politicising his photographs.
What you feel in looking at his New York is an optimism of spirit and gesture that feels both timelessly enduring and long ago lost in the City we experience today.
For nearly a half-century, the photographs of Moisio had been in storage in the basement of his home in Massachusetts. The public has until now has seen only a handful of these images that focus on scenes of a long ago forgotten New York and the culture of that time.
In 2018 a collection of 700 color slides surfaced documenting one of the earliest cross country road trips over route 66 to California from NYC recorded by a professional photographer. Mr. Moisios archive consists of several thousand negatives and photographs waiting to be seen and enjoyed
























Back in New York in 1946, Weiner set up his own commercial studio, beginning by photographing women’s hats for catalogues. The following year, the Photo League found itself on the U.S. Attorney General’s list of “subversive organizations” and disbanded. In 1949 Weiner gave up his studio and turned full time to accepting assignments from the glossy picture magazines: This Week, Collier’s, and Fortune, where Walker Evans was a colleague.One of Weiner’s first assignments was photographing an old-age home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where twenty-nine individuals had died of malnutrition (Collier’s, 1949). In 1952, he photographed the devastating aftermath of a flood in Mondamin, Iowa. Two years later, having spent four months working in Europe, Weiner met Alan Paton, a South African author. Commissioned by Collier’s to do two articles on African Americans, Weiner and Paton worked together again in 1955, this time on an independent project in South Africa which resulted in the publication of South Africa in Transition in 1956. On another commission for Collier’s in 1956, Weiner covered the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., which is recognized as one of the first significant stories to be published on the burgeoning civil rights movement. In the winter of 1956, Fortune sent the photographer to Russia, followed by Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the spring of 1957. Weiner photographed extensively during these trips, hoping to capture a comprehensive overview of the people and their lives; many of the photographs which resulted were published in the magazine. In 1959, Weiner’s life and career tragically came to an end, at thirty-nine years of age, in an airplane crash while on assignment near Versailles, KY.Dan Weiner’s work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions since his first one-person show, a traveling exhibition that originated at the Camera Club in New York, in 1953.In 1967, in the landmark exhibition “The Concerned Photographer,” Dan Weiner’s work was shown alongside photographs by André Kertész, Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, Werner Bischof, and Leonard Freed, organized by Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography in New York.In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented America Worked: The 1950s Photographs of Dan Weiner, in association with a publication of the same title.



































