"He's a good-looking young man, slouching on a bed in his Brooklyn apartment, taking a selfie. Oh, has he pulled out all the stops. He has mounted an old-fashioned plate camera atop a tripod. He has set up a mirror. His dark hair is tightly barbered into a stylish flip. His mustache is neatly trimmed. He is wearing a ribbed, sleeveless white undershirt."
"He mugs comically for the camera but is also trying to come off cool, to get a rise out of people. He is a native of Williamsburg. He is everything we've come to imagine about the neighborhood since it was rebooted at the turn of this century, transmogrifying from a shabby tenement backwater to the post-hipster, faux bohemian paradise it is today."
"Eli was a reserved, unassuming man when I knew him-a retired employee of the federal government. For most of his adult life, he worked at the Raritan Arsenal, in Middlesex County, designing, illustrating, and overseeing the printing of posters, manuals, and booklets for the U.S. Army. I was not unaware of his artsy side. Eli was a gifted hobby photographer and painter."
Dozens of self-portraits from the 1930s and 1940s document a Brooklyn man, Eli Fuchs, posing with vintage equipment and domestic props. Photographs include a 1935 selfie with a plate camera on a tripod, a mirror, and the crib of his newborn daughter, Lola. Images range from comic mugging to deliberately cool, performative poses. Eli worked at the Raritan Arsenal designing and overseeing printed military materials. He practiced photography and painting as hobbies, producing an oil portrait of a grandson. Personal artifacts included visible Playboy magazines left for grandchildren. The images reveal careful visual self-presentation within family settings.
Read at The New Yorker
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