Michael Philip Manheim’s The Smoking Fifties: How Once We Looked: Photographs of the Past returns to small-town Ohio in the years after the Second World War. Drawn from the photographer’s archive, its black-and-white images attend to ordinary public life in the 1950s: street scenes, clothing and social customs, individual faces, and fleeting expressions. The setting is geographically specific, but the book’s subject is broader—the ways a society presented itself while adjusting to the consequences of war.

Manheim approaches this world with sympathy but without reducing it to period charm. Familiar signs of a supposedly simpler America coexist with the era’s tensions, complications, and prejudices. His attention rests on minor incidents and telling details rather than grand historical events. These photographs therefore operate on two levels: as records of a community’s visible habits and as observations of the emotions passing through everyday encounters.

The book also traces a personal beginning. Made during a formative period for Manheim, the photographs reveal the emergence of his documentary vision. His accompanying commentary gives the historical material an authorial counterpoint, placing later reflection beside the immediacy of the images. That dialogue between youthful observation and retrospective understanding distinguishes the work from a purely nostalgic album.

Published by See-Saw Editions in 2017, this 52-page paperback is compact in scope yet focused in purpose. For collectors of postwar American photography, vernacular social history, or artist archives, its importance lies in the conjunction of subject and formation: a close view of 1950s small-town life and an account of a photographer learning how to see it. Rather than presenting the decade as a settled myth, Manheim preserves its surfaces while acknowledging what lay beneath them.