The owner of The Charm Shop—an antique store on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village—Carry Wagner (1896-1993) traveled extensively in order to purchase jewelry and other items for her business. From 1939 to the mid-Sixties, she recorded these trips on 16mm color film, leaving behind a remarkable record of the world that she visited in the years following World War II. The daughter of Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe, she grew up on the Lower East Side, and as a young woman became involved in the women's suffragette movement and the trade union struggles that were taking place in New York City at the time. In 1997, filmmaker Joel Katz made a documentary about Wagner called Dear Carry, distributed by Cinema Guild.
Enlarge the imageImage of Carry Wagner at her store in Greenwich Village, The Charm Shop.
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
The Carry Wagner Collection was the HFA’s first collection of amateur film, donated by Harriet Stella, a friend of Wagner, in 2005. The seventy reels of color film in this collection range from footage shot in apartheid South Africa, to scenes of bombed out German cities in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Highlights include extensive footage of travel via cruise ship, before air travel became commonplace, as well as footage of Franco's Spain, and Morocco and Algeria prior to independence.
This collection is fully inventoried, and a list can be found in the Harvard Library catalog. Select reels have been digitized and are available for remote viewing below. The HFA is undertaking a project to digitize this collection, and new reels will become available as this project progresses.
Inquires on research viewing and re-use of footage in this collection should be directed to the Collections Archivist.
