Ted Croner

signed in pencil on the reverse, 1947, probably printed in the 1950s or 1960s

Collection of the photographer

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, 1998

'In and Out of Focus,' U. S. Camera Annual 1949, p. 38

Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963 (New York, 1992), p. 146

This print, on double-weight paper with a semi-glossy eggshell-textured surface, is in generally good condition. The margin edges are lightly soiled and rubbed, the corners are bumped, and the lower left margin corner is creased. There is slight rippling at the upper and lower margin edges. In raking light, several handling creases are visible, particularly in the right side of the print. None of these appears to break the emulsion. The reverse of the print is lightly soiled, and there is age-darkening at the periphery. When examined with ultraviolet light, this print appears to fluoresce.
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Photographer Ted Croner was only 26 years old when a print of Sharpie in the Cafeteria was chosen by The Museum of Modern Art for its 1948 In and Out of Focus show of new photography.  Later that year, Croner, along with Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan, and Lisette Model, comprised a select group of photographers featured in the Museum’s Four Photographers exhibition.  Croner had arrived in New York in 1945 and was one of a later generation of young photographers who came under the influence of legendary art director and teacher Alexey Brodovitch.  In Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory workshops for the New School, Croner’s fellow pupils included, among others, Richard Avedon, Louis Faurer, and Saul Leiter, all of whom were inspired by Brodovitch to push the boundaries of their work. 

The image offered here is from an early Croner series of photographs, suggested by Brodovitch, that were taken in the cafeterias and subways of New York.  Made with a twin lens reflex and using no flash, Sharpie in a Cafeteria has the cinema verité quality that would become a hallmark of the New York School.   In a 1989 interview, Croner remembered these cafeteria images:  ‘What I saw pleased me more than anything I had done before.  They weren’t pictures of people.  They were pictures of the way I felt . . .’ (quoted in Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963, p. 321). 

‘The reason most of us went in [to Brodovitch’s classes] was to get work for Harper’s Bazaar, hoping that this great art director would discover you,’ Croner recalled.  ‘ . . . And Brodovitch liked me, I guess . . .“Ted [he once said to me].  You have remarkable ability to click the shutter at the right time” . . . Well, it took me twenty years to realize how important it was, what he was saying’ (ibid., p. 293).