Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952-1962

When I bought my copy of Magnum Contact Sheets this past September, I also fell for one of the suggested items that one sees so often in eCommerce. But in this case, I’m glad I did so because I discovered a wonderful collection of photographs entitled Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952-1962, published by Prestel in 2020.

As I looked for more information about this book, I became all the more excited when I discovered that Atlas Gallery had an extensive online exhibition by the same name. Paging through that collection made me want to get my hands on a proper print book of Haas’s wonderful color photography from this era.

The thing that strikes me the most about these images is how Haas used what may appear to be a limitation of the medium he used—that is, the very slow speed of Kodachrome film—to his full advantage. I love the richness of color combined with Haas’s masterful use of blur to convey an abtract sense of motion and energy that he experienced on the streets of New York.