Neal Ranauro Photograph Collection

Like many who came in the 1930s to find work in the factories of New Jersey, Neal Ranauro was born to working-class immigrants in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town. Ranauro was representative, in background and education, of the men and women hired by the building-supply company Johns-Manville at its plant in Manville, NJ; but his career was to be somewhat unusual. By 1946, America had won a war and enjoyed a restored economy, and Ranauro (who worked in J-M's production division) had taken up photography as a hobby. That year Johns-Manville offered him a job in the Industrial Relations Office taking company photographs.

The Neal Ranauro Photograph Collection is a uniquely valuable visual chronicle of an entire era in the life of a New Jersey town and company. The Eisenhower period, when Ranauro photographed Johns- Manville, was a high point for American big business, and the culture of the Johns-Manville Company-and the borough of Manville, NJ, where it had its largest installation-typified the spirit of an age. The people of Johns-Manville were exuberant and energetic, optimistic, democratic and egalitarian, forward-looking and yet loyal to traditions of family and community life. For nearly forty years, Neal Ranauro took photographs of them and their city, of community groups and organizations, municipal services, private clubs, parties, dances and public ceremonies, covering major events like the town's fiftieth anniversary celebrations, parades, strikes and disasters like the flood of 1955, and more intimately, details of daily life.

Thus the collection is doubly valuable. Objectively, it documents history: the people, places and events of Manville and J-M throughout a remarkable period, in well over three thousand images of high quality. Even more important may be the evidence provided by these photos of a subjective viewpoint. Whether taken for the plant magazine Spotlight or for sharing directly with their subjects, Ranauro's photographs, both because of and despite their official sanction, reveal the people of Manville and Johns-Manville as they saw themselves. Technological advance and economic development are major themes in the collection-and the company support of the town which often made that possible (for example its donation in 1954 of materials to build a new high school). Attention is given to achievements rather than problems, and even daily life (as for example in the series of photos taken of the Weidlick family [folder JM27]) takes on an ideal quality. The self-consciousness of this presentation may be glimpsed not only in individual subjects, but in the choice of subjects and the careful staging of even the most "spontaneous" photographs. Indeed, self-consciousness proves to be a characteristic facet of this complex corporate and local culture-which is likewise remarkable for its charity and humor.

Yet there is an irony associated with this collection. Felled by liabilities incurred by the health hazards associated with asbestos, Johns-Manville was not to share in the resurgence of big business in the 1980s, and so its history may serve as an object lesson in the dangers of too willfully optimistic a faith in the benefits of heavy industry and technology. By that optimism, as these photographs plainly show, Americans for a time were able to build what they conceived of, and could look back on, as a golden age of progress and economic opportunity. In the case of Johns-Manville, however, the price of progress was also to become very clear, if only slowly. Neal Ranauro's photographs, in showing what the men and women of Manville saw, show also what they did not see.