Anita Heimbruch – “The Amazing Color Photographs of Hoboken”

August 4 - September 15

Step back in time to mid-century Hoboken through the vivid Kodachrome images shot by Anita Heimbruch (1908 – 1995), a long-time employee at Hoboken’s Keuffel & Esser factory at Third and Adams Streets. Her photographs portray the daily lives of working-class Hoboken: at festivals, on stoops, on the waterfront, and in back yards with criss-crossed lines of laundry drying above. 

It’s somewhat shocking to see these familiar scenes in such saturated colors. Aside from the movies, we are accustomed to a black-and-white view of the world before the 1970s, when affordable color film and easy-to-use cameras were widespread among American consumers. Most art photographers disdained color film before the 1970s and 80s, as black-and-white film more sharply renders an artist’s eye for composition, and could be cropped or manipulated when developed into prints in a darkroom. 

Heimbruch’s skill with a Leica camera, framing scenes for composition and color, is impressive, especially considering slides were designed for projection at full frame, not cropped. In the 15 images (11” x 14”) printed from Heimbruch’s slides, we see brightly colored fruit arrayed on a street vendor’s cart, neighbors sharing a moment watching a wedding party disembarking from shiny limousines on Garden St., a longshoreman pausing from a long day’s work, zeppole bobbing in a vat of hot oil at a street festival. 

Most of these images were intended to be shared via slide projector, usually with friends and neighbors in a soiree at Heimbruch’s home on the 1200 block of Garden Street. The vast majority of her slides were from her travels abroad, but about 75 were of her hometown. 

We don’t know many details of Anita Heimbruch’s life, who lived at 1217 Garden Street and worked for K&E, the engineering instrument manufacturer with two factory buildings at Third and Adams. One of her jobs there was tending the spiders whose filaments were used in precision sights for surveyors. Among her papers, donated to the Museum after she died in a nearby nursing home, were K&E newsletters documenting her participation in the company’s photography club, and her induction into the company’s “Old Guard” ranks after 25 years of tenure. As a young woman, she earned an award in a student art competition at the New York School of Applied Design for Women.

The images will be on display from August 4 – September 15 in the Upper Gallery of the Hoboken Museum. A digital slideshow of the rest of the Hoboken scenes will play in a loop on a screen in the Upper Gallery. All are welcome for an opening reception on Sunday, August 4, from 2 – 5 pm. 

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.