New York City Market 8

New York City Market 8

In this image customers at a market produce counter wait and watch while a vendor holds up a bunch of beets before setting them down on the scale.

Because it was never published, little is known about this Life Magazine assignment covering one of the new, state-of-the-art indoor food markets in New York City.  Its subject matter, ordinary people working with their hands or performing daily tasks, suited Kosti. Here the setting is urban, a detour from his more usual rural settings, but the photographer invests the same energy and powers of observation capturing the spirit of the scene. Here, in an extraordinary composition, he uses chiaroscuro to throw a diagonal streak of light across the image, illuminating and connecting the produce and the faces of the older woman and the customers against a darkened background. The shapely metal scales hanging from the ceiling pick up the light and punctuate the scene. The image is timeless in its references to Renaissance chiaroscuro painting, where light and dark were used to heighten the spatial and emotional dimensionality of a scene. 

Narratively, the Market series notes the theme of government intervention in the marketplace during wartime. Until 1945, New York City dwellers purchased their food from an unregulated constellation of small grocery stores, retail butchers, and push-cart street vendors. During World War II the FDR administration ordered the Works Progress Administration (WPA), with the support of Mayor LaGuardia, to build ten modern, indoor, sanitary and affordable market facilities fitted with cold storage throughout the five boroughs of New York City. The new system was overseen by a new Commissioner of Consumer Services under the NYC Department of Markets, who delivered "weekly radio addresses on WNYC...on food prices, seasonal produce and recipes." According to the website turnstiletours.com the ten markets "were especially useful during...[wartime] rationing and food shortages." Kosti's images provide a vivid glimpse back into a post-Depression era of provisioning preceding the advent of the supermarket, when the costs of waste were high, and personal interactions with the producers of the food itself were intrinsic to the experience.