The architectural photography firm of Gottscho-Schleisner worked along the east coast of the United States from the mid-'30s through the late '50s, and their pictures adorned the brochures and portfolios of architects and interior designers, and appeared, usually without noticeable credit, in home-improvement and decorating magazines like House Beautiful.

The firm began with Samuel H. Gottscho's decision to quit his day job as a traveling salesman and commit to his longstanding passion for architectural and garden photography. Gottscho was born in 1875 and began photographing as an amateur during the boom years of amateur photography at the beginning of the 20th century. Like most of his fellow amateurs, he worked with larger cameras on tripods, and looked to the Pictorialist traditions, choosing landscapes and floral and garden subjects, until in the '20s he became entranced with the idea of moving into the commercial world as an architectural photographer. In the middle '20s, he began his commercial career. In the mid '30s, William Schleisner joined the firm, and the partnership lasted until Schleisner's death. Gottscho continued to photograph into his 70s.

Gottscho and Schleisner started working in Levittown probably at the behest of the architect Morris Lapidus, whose firm was designing commercial structures in the new community. Gottscho-Schleisner was a favorite of Lapidus, and their swooping views of commercial interiors, replete with an almost supernatural light, reveal their talent for making the very best of commercial architecture.

One such project was the Holly Clothing Store, a Lapidus project that celebrated the unity of modernist architecture and postwar consumerism. Gottscho-Schleisner's photographs showed a pair of facades glowing in the dark night, their products agleam and seductive.

The interiors, too, showed a similar affinity between photographer and architect, modernism and the seduction of things to buy, hold, wear. The cashier's desk almost dances:

One of the strengths of these pictures for us, now, 50 years later, is the way they articulate the postwar modernist look. In Lapidus' Holly Store children's section, the smaller display tables float on their tubular chrome legs, and the lighting fixtures give linear order to the scene. Gottscho-Schleisner used short focal-length lenses, wide-angle lenses, on view cameras-- probably a 8-1/4" lens on a 4x5 Deardorff or the equivalents. This combination gave the swooping, exaggerated quality of the space, and made objects seem to rise off the floor, defying gravity.

Power in all its implications, was at the center of the American Cold War experience. On one extreme were the global questions of America as a world power, and the powers of the Russian adversary; on the other, the more mundane but seductive promises of mechanical and technological power promised with the scientific-technical-manufacturing revolutions born in World War II and brought to fruition in the decade after the end of the war-- big cars, cheap electricity, new appliances promising ease and comfort.

In Gottscho-Schleisner's view of a Long Island Lighting Company appliance store all of that is present, and hidden at the same time. The picture was made in 1953, years before Richard Nixon would stand in a model kitchen at a trade exposition and lecture Russian Premier Kruschev about American ascendence on the wings of appliances, in the infamous "kitchen debates." But the ambience of the '50s came in part out of that sense that material prosperity, power, and global influence were all somehow, confusingly, linked together.

The photographers returned in the later '50s to photograph some of Levittown's houses for the upscale glossy house-mag, House Beautiful. There, too, the results were spectacular. Now Levittown had grown up; the trees shaded wide streets, and the houses and lawns, gardens and yards had all taken on the character of their owner-occupants. Gottscho-Schliesner photographed these houses with the dignity and respect Gottscho himself had applied at the turn of the century to more palatial residences and gardens, when he was an amateur pictorialist. The result was to dignify Levittown in ways it had never been before: truly, under the eyes of these photographers, the Levittown houses had become proper fare for House Beautiful

Our opportunity to see these pictures is the result of a visionary gift by Schleisner's family to the Library of Congress of the United States. The pictures are held in the Prints and Photographs Division, one of the great treasures of America. The photographs are also included, sometimes with more detailed information sheets, on the Library of Congress's American Memory Website.

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