America Worked: The 1950s Photographs of Dan Weiner

Reproduced here are 170 black-and-white photographs by photojournalist Weiner, whose work appeared regularly in Fortune magazine in the 1950s before his death in a plane crash in 1959, aged 39. He treated his usual suburban subjects--backyards and barbecues, commuters, corporate execs, kaffeeklatsches--with a gentle subversivity which, as Ewing ( The Fugitive Gesture: Dance and Photography ) points out, often belied the effusive copy accompanying his shots (``Like all Kaiser men, he seems to be having a hell of a good time''captions an expressively angry argument held in a spartan boardroom). In contrast to the ironic photos of giddy suburbanism dominating this collection are others taken in the style of Walker Evans, whom Weiner greatly admired: sensitive, respectful portraits of the poor and the old; a striking study of a white woman on an otherwise empty bus during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956; a toy-horn vendor, ignored by the crowd in Times Square on New Year's Eve, 1951. Tiger offers a concise, observant and funny introduction to the decade that Weiner ably documented. (June)