Familiar Lens / Familiar Tides

Familiar Lens/Familiar Tides is the working title for projects featuring photography by Hal Foster in and around WWII.

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Three years ago, I recovered a cache of negatives from my grandmother’s garage in the Nevada desert, where they had sat untouched for more than thirty years. After scanning them, I quickly became obsessed with a group of photos taken by my grandfather between 1939 and 1945.  

Born Hershel Lionel Feigenbaum, he was a Jewish kid; a photography enthusiast living in Brooklyn who volunteered for military service in 1942. He became an Army photographer and was assigned to one of the many USAAF heavy bombing groups in East Anglia. Yet the photographs I salvaged are not images of war. Instead, they document the ordinary lives expanding around it.

These snapshots feel strikingly contemporary: young people study in libraries, gather with friends on brownstone stoops, sign yearbooks, attend peace rallies, spend afternoons in the park, and gradually exchange civilian clothes for uniforms. Seen together, the prewar New York photos and wartime images from England illuminate intrinsically human qualities of resilience and community.

Grandpa Hal never spoke about his experience in the war. He returned home a fanatically anti-war American, becoming a clinical psychologist, professor, and empathetic observer of human behavior.

I interpret this inherited archive as an opportunity to see through my grandfather’s eyes: both a repository of memory and an invitation for self- and social examination. Created amid renewed global conflict, political polarization, and debates over democracy and civic responsibility, these photographs invite reflection on how we might persist during periods of uncertainty.