If you live in a big city, lunchtime is among the choicest hours for people-watching—for what the photographer Charles H. Traub refers to as “the passing parade of the street.” Between 1977 and 1980, Traub held two jobs that left him smack in the middle of the midday urban bustle. As the chairman of the photography department at Columbia College, he’d take his Rolleiflex SL66 camera out onto Chicago’s Loop and take pictures of strangers; later, as the director of the Light Gallery, in New York City, he did the same around Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, “the center of the world.”
His resulting portraits—which also include subjects in Paris, Miami, and other cities—present lunchtime characters like species of butterfly in an entomologist’s shadow box. Traub captures his human specimens in blunt closeup, their personalities fixed to the page in extravagant, often merciless, detail. There are freckled little kids and rouged old biddies, elegant fashionistas and prim gentlemen. Eyeglasses, cigarettes, giant hair, and wind-swept neckties float and jut before the camera like props in a live game of “Guess Who.” Traub, who today is the founding chairman of the graduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, calls himself a “real-world witness” photographer; of his lunchtime series he says, “I knew that, if one asked, people were delighted to be noticed.”
A new collection of Traub’s lunchtime series is out this month from Damiani.
