Carl Mydans
Plates contributed
The 3 plates attributed to Carl Mydans in the 1955 MoMA Master Checklist (Exhibition #569).
| ID | Country | Section | Year | View |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| photo-0077 | Germany | Family and children | — | Clervaux |
| photo-0111 | Japan | Family and children | — | Clervaux |
| photo-0148 | USA | Work | — | Clervaux |
Notes
Three plates in the catalog (count verified by strict-match grep against data/photographs.csv 2026-05-09): photo-0077 (Germany), photo-0111 (Japan), photo-0148 (USA). All three credited ‘American’ in the MoMA Master Checklist. Date discrepancy (recorded 2026-05-09): src-icp-carl-mydans-archive (in repo, fetched 2026-05-09) records the birth year as ‘1906’; src-wikipedia-carl-mydans-pointer (in repo, fetched 2026-05-09) records ‘(May 20, 1907 – August 16, 2004)’ in the opening sentence and ‘1907’ in the infobox, with the ‘aged 97’ annotation matching a 1907 birth to August 2004. This row records 1907 per the Wikipedia text and arithmetic check on the death-age annotation. ICP discrepancy preserved in src-icp-carl-mydans-archive notes; promotion to Tier-1/2 awaits a fetch of his August 2004 NYT obituary (URL attempted 2026-05-09 and returned HTTP 403; no Wayback in this round). Day-month tokens, Medford, Massachusetts birthplace, and Larchmont, New York place-of-death carry pointer status from src-wikipedia-carl-mydans-pointer. FSA period 1935 (brief) per both src-icp-carl-mydans-archive and src-wikipedia-carl-mydans-pointer; LIFE staff from 1936 until magazine closed in 1972 per src-icp-carl-mydans-archive (‘In 1936 he was hired as one of the four photographers to help launch Life magazine; he remained an active staff photographer until the magazine closed in 1972’). The ‘one of the four’ framing on the ICP page is loose phrasing — the canonical four-name original-LIFE roster (Eisenstaedt, Bourke-White, McAvoy, Stackpole) per src-wikipedia-carl-mydans-pointer and already-corroborated by src-icp-eisenstaedt-archive / src-icp-bourke-white-archive does NOT include Mydans. Plate geography Germany / Japan / USA is consistent with his postwar Time-Life Tokyo bureau (1945–49), Korean War, and US assignments per src-icp-carl-mydans-archive; specific plate-to-assignment matches NOT verified at the plate level in this round. Neither ICP nor Wikipedia mentions FoM by name on Mydans’s page (verified by string-search 2026-05-09).
External biography
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/carl-mydans
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src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist -
src-icp-carl-mydans-archive -
src-wikipedia-carl-mydans-pointer