MC 919

Inventory to the Neal Ranauro Photograph Collection

By Wendell Piez

August 1992

Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.

Finding aid encoded in EAD, version 2002 by Tara Maharjan, October 2020

Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University received an operating support grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division of the Department of State.

Scope and Content Note

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.

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Arrangement Note

Neal Ranauro filed and saved his photographic prints and negatives mostly in 9" x 12" envelopes. When the collection was received, approximately eighty envelopes, containing images relating to the borough of Manville, were arranged chronologically, while another seventy contained images of the Johns-Manville plant in Manville, also in mainly chronological order. Additionally, there were numerous envelopes and loose photographs (often filed together in sleeves) which fell into neither group. During the processing of the collection, more photographs were acquired: a box containing negatives and prints, mainly sleeved by occasion, of the Johns-Manville Club, and a box of loose prints of subjects in the Manville plan

The arrangement of the collection reflects Neal Ranauro's organization. The original accession consists of four series: MANVILLE PHOTOGRAPHS, JOHNS-MANVILLE PHOTOGRAPHS related to the plant in Manville, ADDITIONAL (MISCELLANEOUS) PHOTOGRAPHS, and ALBUMS AND OVERSIZE PHOTOGRAPHS. A further series contains the bulk of the second accession, JOHNS-MANVILLE CLUB PHOTOGRAPHS. Both because the activities of town and corporation, throughout the period Neal Ranauro worked, were so closely involved in one another, and because Ranauro's own filing was sometimes haphazard, these series overlap each other considerably. Although Ranauro's numbering was not preserved, the order of envelopes was, with rearrangement limited to rectifying obvious errors (such as replacing misfiled photos), and, infrequently, separating or combining envelopes where that was warranted by their occasions or subjects. Thus the researcher will often find the same subject represented in more than one place (for example, the Johns-Manville Club appears in folders 73 and 74 of the series MANVILLE PHOTOGRAPHS as well as in its own series). The researcher should also be forewarned that the folders' chronological arrangement is only a rough one, as Ranauro's dates proved sometimes to be incorrect (e.g. photos of the war hero John Basilone were filed under 1940, photos from a 1948 Spotlight under 1954). With very few exceptions, however, each image is filed in only one place.

Within each series there are three subseries, "Prints," "Negatives" and "Related Documents." (Exceptions are ALBUMS AND OVERSIZE PHOTOGRAPHS, for which there are no negatives, and JOHNS-MANVILLE PHOTOGRAPHS, which also contains a subseries "Reel Film.") These are stored separately, although in order to represent the collection's exact contents more clearly, the container list presents, along with the list of prints, a listing of the negatives which were found in the same envelope. A single number will designate a single image, in both print and negative media. The subseries "Negatives" also includes a few positive transparencies. "Related Documents" include such items as caption forms describing photographs for Spotlight, programs for the events Ranauro photographed, newspaper clippings, press releases, and so forth. This material has also been foldered (with fragile items photocopied onto acid-free paper), labelled to correspond to the photograph collection, and stored apart from the images. Copies of Spotlight, the in- house Johns-Manville magazine for which Ranauro took photographs, have been removed and catalogued separately (available in the Sinclair New Jersey Collection). The single moving picture in the collection, shot in the Johns-Manville plant in 1954, is stored at the end of the collection.

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Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Neal Ranauro Photograph Collection, MC 919, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.

Processing Note

Additional processing of this collection was completed by Kate McCarthy in September 2020.

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Detailed Description of the Collection/Container List

This section provides descriptions of the materials found within each series. Each series description is followed by a container list, which gives the titles of the "containers" (for example, folders, volumes, or cassettes) and their locations in the numbered boxes that comprise the collection. The availability of any digital items from a container is indicated with a hyperlink.