HACKENSACK, N.J.—Thoughts and words come fitfully to the old sailor. But Herman Schnipper, 91, is adamant about his wishes for the pictures he took while stationed on the USS Astoria. The 1,500 prints—sheathed in plastic, captioned and stored in his Hackensack apartment—depict in black-and-white splendor the drama and drudgery of military service.
“I don’t want them to be put in a box and forgotten,” he said slowly, quietly. “I want to show people the war.”
Schnipper was a skinny kid out of Bayonne when the Navy, aware of his hobby, gave him a camera and a darkroom and made him the light cruiser Astoria’s photographer.
From May 1944 through the end of World War II and for several months after, he chronicled the hostilities in the Pacific experienced by the Astoria and also the daily routine of its crew: Sailors in perfect formation for inspection. Shipmates mugging for the camera. A cook cracking open a crate of dried salmon. A boxing match on the ship’s fantail.
The collection of photographs has followed Schnipper as he moved from one Teaneck house to another to another and finally to the Hackensack high-rise where he and his wife, Julie, have resided for 18 years. Now, the couple’s daughters, Rachel Ohnouna and Sari Shlufman, want to give their dad’s wartime photography its due.
“We'd love to put them in a book and show what he did because it’s a shame they’re hidden away,” Shlufman told The Record, adding that the family feels urgency because of her father’s age and bouts of illness.
Whether the photos form the basis of a book or a big museum exhibit, the daughters would love if their modest, unassuming father were around to bask in the attention.
Schnipper never worked professionally as a photographer; he was a lithographer who made print advertisements. But his World War II pictures have won him fans.
“He’s nothing short of a national treasure,” said Brent Jones, an Astoria enthusiast whose great uncle was a crewman. “Herman’s a genuine man who did an amazing job capturing an important era in our history.”
Jones created a website—mighty90.com—that preserves the history of the light cruiser Astoria (a heavy-class cruiser named Astoria was sunk in 1942).
Schnipper’s images fill the site. Jones, who lives in Texas, began visiting Schnipper in 2007 to scan all the photos. He grew so close to Herman and Julie Schnipper that he was a guest at their grandson’s bar mitzvah.
Outside of mighty90.com, Schnipper’s pictures haven’t been widely seen. There was a long-ago exhibit at the Teaneck library. An occasional photo turns up in a book, such as “Clear for Action: The Photographic Story of Modern Naval Combat 1898–1964.”
