Arthur Leipzig
1918 -
Home page: http://www.arthurleipzig.com
In 1941 Arthur Leipzig (b. 1918) registered for a $6 class at New York's Photo League and, with a $3 scholarship and a 9 x 12 Zeiss Ikon, his lifetime involvement with photography began. The Photo League was made up of photographers dedicated to promoting social documentary photography, as well as photography's capacity to be art. Leipzig studied with Sid Grossman and Paul Strand and at the time was exposed to seminal figures such as Berenice Abbott and W. Eugene Smith.
In 1942 Leipzig became a staff photographer for The Newspaper PM an influential publication that used photography in abundance and allowed its photographers free reign. During this period he completed his first photo essay on Children's Street Games. In 1946 he left PM and worked for a short time at International News Photos, before becoming a freelance photojournalist. For the next five decades he worked for such leading newspapers and magazines as The Sunday New York Times, Fortune, Look, This Week, Life, as well as for organizations including The Ford Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and many others. As he traveled around the world, Leipzig shot beautifully constructed socially powerful photographs. Among the most memorable are his essays on Children's Street Games, VE Day in New York City, Bridge Painters atop the Brooklyn Bridge, New York City Subway, Pablo Casals, "Jewish Life Around the World", Coal Country and "Growing up in New York." Although celebrity photography as practiced by the relentless paparazzi is not his style, Leipzig's work includes quite a few well-known personalities of the last sixty years, including Louis Prima, Sidney Bechet, Nobel Laureate Roslyn Yalow and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, among many others.
Acclaimed as a sensitive and impassioned documentary photographer, Arthur Leipzig has always directed his camera toward the human condition and his deep love of people. His photographs capture evocative images in available light, with the effect that there is a startling beauty in his work. Rather than force the moment, Leipzig allows the human story to transform simply and spontaneously. As a result, Leipzig's photographs depict the human community with great intimacy and dynamic energy. Whether photographing children on the streets of New York, the Mabaan people in the southern Sudan, coal miners and their families in West Virginia, Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic or winter fishing in the North Atlantic, "Leipzig's life work has been a sustained creative response to the challenge of photography as a means for expressing fundamental human experience." (Bonnie Yochelson, photo historian and curator)
Leipzig's distinguished work has been seen in many group and solo shows, beginning with "New Faces" in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art, and later in 1955 in Edward Steichen's landmark exhibition "The Family of Man," as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Photography as a Fine Art" exhibits in 1961 and 1962. His one-man exhibitions included retrospectives at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art and the Hillwood Museum; "Growing up in New York" at the Museum of the City of New York; "Jewish Life Around the World" at the Nassau Museum of Fine Art; "Arthur Leipzig: A World View" at the Howard Greenberg Gallery; "Arthur Leipzig's People" at the Frumkin Adams Gallery; and "Arthur Leipzig's New York" at Photofind Gallery. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Jewish Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, among others.
Leipzig has published three books: On Assignment; Growing Up in New York; and Sarah's Daughters. He has received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography, the National Urban League Photography Award, several annual Art Directors Awards, and two Long Island University Trustees Awards for Scholarly Achievement.