Moving Pictures: West Side Story

In 2016, the Google Cultural Institute supported the digitization of over 1,300 photographs of the original 1957 production of West Side Story from our Martha Swope, Friedman-Abeles, Florence Vandamm, Kenn Duncan, and Avery Willard photography collections. It is always exciting to be able to provide wider access to our collections, but this project is especially thrilling  because we are seeing, in many cases for the first time in decades, images that the photographer never developed beyond the original negatives. There are hundreds of images of dance and music rehearsals taken (mostly) by Martha Swope. There is the famous Friedman-Abeles shot (used on the original Playbill cover) of Larry Kert (Tony) and Carol Lawrence (Maria) running down a street in the Upper West Side, but there are also the shots just before and just after the moment captured in that iconic image which were not used.

As I examined the wealth of digital photographs we now have, I began to wonder whether it would be possible to join the sequential images from a single negative strip to create a very short movie.  Using the "Animation Assistant" tool in Google Photos, I stitched together a few of these sequences, and I found the results to be a little breathtaking.  There was a rehearsal for "Dance at the Gym" with Jerome Robbins watching and joining in on the snaps! There was Bernstein conducting a music rehearsal while Sondheim played on the piano! Seeing Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert freed from their frozen moment on the Playbill image and actually running down the street felt a little like stepping out of a time machine into 1957.

I am confident there are many, many more such treasures in our photograph collections. The Theatre Division preserves well over a million photographic negatives documenting the last century and a half of theatre, and like these West Side Story photographs, many have never before been seen.  If you are interested in supporting the work of bringing this history into the light of the open web, please drop us a note at theatre@nypl.org.

For now, those, enjoy these tiny, magical, moments from 1957: