leogoldsteinphotographycollection.com

leogoldstein.photos@gmail.com

East Harlem: The Postwar Years, powerHouse Books, 2019

For further info contact Naomi Goldstein: 917-596-3157

Leo Goldstein, 1901 – 1972

Leo Goldstein was born in 1901 in Kishinev in Bessarabia, an Eastern European region of Czarist Russia. Fleeing the pogroms, his family first settled on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1906, later moving to East Harlem.. Leo was the fourth of 13 children and went to work at an early age to help support the large family. As a young man he studied sculpting and was a talented amateur artist, taking up photography when he joined the Photo League in the late 1940s.

He threw himself into the social documentary tradition of the League, turning his lens, as many of the League members did, to the migrant and poor communities in New York City.  He was greatly influenced by the work of Paul Strand, Lewis Hine and Berenice Abbott, among other members. 

Beginning in 1949, and over several years, Leo photographed in East Harlem using a  Rolleiflex twin-lens camera that he had bought second hand.  With the body of work from East Harlem, Leo left an important and unique addition to the Harlem and Lower East Side studies done earlier by Photo League members.

Until 2016, when the prints were catalogued, the East Harlem photographs remained mostly untouched and unseen. Working with photo editor Regina Monfort, the family was able to have East Harlem: The Postwar Years published by powerHouse Books in the fall of 2019. The book includes 70 duotone images and essays by the award-winning journalist Juan Gonzalez and well known photography critic A.D. Coleman. The 70 vintage prints reproduced in the book  are part of a larger collection of East Harlem photographs consisting of over 250 silver gelatin vintage prints made by the artist.

The East Harlem book garnered excellent reviews, including an essay by Vince Aletti published in the journal Photograph. See the website listed above for this review and others.

A small number of Leo’s images have appeared in exhibits and publications of Photo League work, beginning with the seminal exhibit This Is the Photo League (1948-1949) and later in the book, This Was the Photo League, published by the Stephen Daiter Gallery and John Cleary Gallery in 2001. His work was included in “The Photo League, 1936-1951,” an exhibition organized by Howard Greenberg at the Photofind Gallery in Woodstock, NY in 1985. One of Leo’s images was also included in the 2011-12 exhibit at the Jewish Museum entitled “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951.” 

Leo Goldstein’s work is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Home Page: www.margaretmccarthy.com

Contact: artist@margaretmccarthy.com

Inspired and indebted to mythology, photographer  Margaret McCarthy brings the eye of a poet to her photography, exploring the archetypes of myth and dream in her imagery.

“I want to reach the viewer on an intuitive level, with photographs that are visually, psychologically and spiritually compelling,” she says. “My goal:  to make images that bridge past and future, inner and outer worlds, art and commerce. My philosophy: Beauty in an ugly age is revolutionary.”

Her techniques include working with B&W infrared film, using images in sequences, and collage in order to create a sense of “otherworldliness” and a transcendent vision of the human imagination. Her landscapes capture a sense of the fecund creativity of the natural world.

She has exhibited her photographs extensively, including the Fogg Art Museum, the Overseas Press Club and The Hudson River Museum, as well as numerous galleries, universities and public exhibition spaces. Her “Divine Feminine” series is now part of the Kinsey Institute Art Collection.

A few of the fine art publications where her work has appeared in include: MUSEÈ Magazine, aCURATOR,  LE JOURNAL de la PHOTOGRAPHIE,  Elizabeth Avedon’s Photography BlogSpot, ARTS AND LETTERS JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE,  WRITING ON WATER  (MIT Press), PARABOLA Magazine, IN PRAISE OF THE MUSE: Women Artists Datebook, and COMBINATIONS: A JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY.  Her work was the subject of an Adams-Russell Cable TV documentary, MARGARET McCARTHY PHOTOGRAPHS IRELAND.   McCarthy’s images have garnered clients as diverse as BMG Classics (the Bertelsmann Music Group), Narada World Music, Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co., Westchester Gannett Newspapers and the New York Times Travel Section.  She has also documented the peace and social justice movements of the last two decades with her camera.  She is a member of ASMP, the American Society of Media Photographers and its Fine Art Brain trust, and APA, American Photographic Artists.

McCarthy has been awarded fellowship grants from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation and The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences.   The National Tourist Office of Spain, The Irish Tourist Board, The Council on International Education Exchange (CIEE) and The Aegean Institute have supported her independent photographic projects all over the world.

A graduate of New York City’s School of Visual Arts, she has taught and mentored art students through The Great Lakes Colleges New York Arts Program.

An accomplished writer as well, McCarthy’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals; her play about John Lennon, THE SACRIFICIAL KING, was given a New York City production by the World 3 Theatre Company.

DEIRDRE was presented at La Mama Theatre’s Experiments, NYC.

Her latest venture A VISION AND A VERSE www.avisionandaverse.com

combines her imagery and poetry as an electronic broadside.

CONTACT: Annekingmanpage@gmail.com

Charlotte Brooks is a photojournalist who worked for LOOK magazine
from 1951 until 1971 and was the only long-term woman staff photographer during LOOK’s 35 year history. As a “sociologist with a camera” Brooks’ thoughtful photographs document the changing face of America in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Brooks was born charlotte Finkelstein on September 16, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York where she grew up graduating from Erasmus Hall, Brooklyn College and later attended University of Minnesota.

Charlotte returned to New York to further pursue her childhood interests in photography and dance. She studied with Bernice Abbott at the New School for Social Research and in 1942 got a job combining both her
passions assisting photographer Barbara Morgan, famous for her images of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. In 1943 she became Gjon Mili’s assistant and became well versed in his Modernist style. She branched out on her own in 1944 and after her images were brought to the attention of Roy Stryker she joined his project at Standard Oil of New Jersey documenting in photographs the story of oil during World War II. The job ended in 1946 when Stryker’s FSA team returned from war.

After freelancing for the next three years, her friend Arthur Rothstein
introduced her to the people at LOOK magazine in 1951 where she remained until its demise in 1971. As a female magazine staff
photographer at that time, Brooks broke ground and changed the workplace for future women photojournalists. When she joined
the American Society for Magazine Photographers she was only one of three female members. In 1953 she served as its secretary and
vice-president in 1955 and negotiated hard to change the gender differential in pay.

In the years following LOOK Charlotte conducted photography workshops for the U.S. State Department in Romania and Soviet Georgia in the mid-1970’s and held classes for teenagers at a local community center.

Albert Dixon Simmons, naturalist, outdoors photographer, author, and guide

Archive Representative: John W. Flynn, Jr. adsimphoto@gmail.com

Albert Dixon Simmons (1892-1972) was a pioneer in nature action photography and filmmaking, their use in studying the flight mechanics of birds, and the use of Kodachrome color films.  He authored two photography books in association with noted sporting genre publisher and editor Eugene V. Connett III.

A native of Prince Edward Island and 1916 M.I.T. graduate (Architecture), the Great Depression forced a career reset and focus shifted to his passion for the outdoors, at first using cameras to reveal the technical nuances of avian flight.  Adapting a camera mount to a rifle stock with open gun sights, Simmons “shot” fast-moving birds in flight, with revealing slow motion footage, and elegant images from 35mm negatives collectively published as Wing Shots (1936, Derrydale Press, NY).  With its release noted by Time magazine, each of the 83 images was a gravure print made from a corresponding mounted, titled and signed black & white photograph, but no text beyond the contents and Forward pages.  Selected images were included in Leica’s promotional touring exhibits, the 1937 Leica Annual, and Leica Manual, print ads, and articles he published in Nature and Field & Stream magazines.  In 1936, he also became involved with the first generation of Kodachrome transparency and motion picture films, traveling to the US Gulf Coast and, in 1937, to Bird Rock (Rochers aux Oiseaux) in Canada, to document migratory species with some of the first color transparencies and films of birds in the wild.

Wing Shots images comprise nearly all of Simmons’s signed printed works; he made only a few personal prints from Bird Rock images and a handful of prints after the 1930s, preferring transparencies for slide show presentations.  He continued to write and photograph commercially for wartime and sporting publications and equipment manufacturers, was Outdoors editor for the Cleveland News, provided radio commentary, and maintained relationships with the Cleveland Zoo and Cleveland Museum of Natural History throughout his life.  He contracted as guide/photographer for hunting and fishing expeditions, with the experiences from Alaska to Africa culminating in Photography for Sportsmen (1951, D. van Nostrand, NY), a detailed how-to guide for nature and outdoors photographers and filmmakers.

Each year, Simmons and his wife summered in her native Nova Scotia, combining family, friends, and work, until his death there in 1972.  His cameras and extensive library, many negatives, transparencies, prints, and motion pictures, were sold, given away, or misplaced in the ensuing years, but the majority of original Wing Shots negatives and many early Kodachromes, as well as unpublished images depicting Maritime province life in the 1950’s and early ‘60s, were kept by his daughter but remained idle for decades.

The chance discovery in 2011 of a manuscript about Bird Rock, hand-assembled by Simmons and begun over 70 years earlier, confirmed a family rumor that, in his last years, he was attempting to complete a third book, though nothing was found after his passing.  Early in 1972, in failing health, Simmons had sent the manuscript to the colleague who accompanied him to Bird Rock thirty-five years earlier, in 1937, as a gesture of friendship and thanks.  Amazingly, through charmed kismet and the internet, it joined the rest of the Simmons archive, which is managed by his grandson.

The George Eastman House keeps a small number of Simmons’s transparencies in its permanent collection as examples of first-generation Kodachrome and glass slide mounting technique.

Sweetie and Sonya on Borinquen,Brooklyn, New York, 1999

Contact: regina.monfort@icloud.com / www.reginamonfort.com

Born in 1958 in Saint-Brieuc, France, Regina Monfort left home at a young age, compelled to expand her horizons. Her love for black-and-white cinematography drove her to study photography. In 1984, after graduating from L’Ecole de Photographie de la Ville de Bruxelles, Monfort left Europe for the United States. Not interested in pursuing a career in commercial photography, she worked as an assistant photographer at the Dallas Museum of Art and later as a museum photographer for the Yale University Art Gallery. On her time off, Monfort pursued her own work with the nude figure and experimental portraiture. In 1990, shortly after moving to New York she became employed at the Irving Penn Studio where she spent seven years working closely with the photographer’s print archive.

In 1994, Monfort began photographing young people from the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section. It is then that she recognized a passion for working in the documentary mode. In 1997, an essay titled, “Growing up in Brooklyn,” appeared in CultureFront Magazine. Later that year, Monfort received a prize from the Columbia School of Art resulting in an exhibition in the New York City subway. In 1998, her work was nominated for the Human Spirit Essay category as part as the annual Alfred Eisenstaedt Award in Magazine Photography. That same year, with grants from the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, Monfort produced outdoor slide shows in the communities she documented.

Monfort’s photographs have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Public Library, the Columbia University School of Social Work, Fotoseptiembre, Kansas State University, Lianzhou International Photo Festival, the Museum of the City of New York, The New York Public Library, PhotoEspana, Soros Open Society Institute and in the New York City Subway among other venues. Selected works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Public Library and the Yale Art Gallery. Her work has appeared in DoubleTake, French Elle, El Diario, the Children’s Beat, Mixt(e), Newsday, Photo District News, The Source, The Village Voice and a number of cultural and scholarly publications.

Monfort has taught at CUNY La Guardia Community College, Pratt Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interest in the preservation of photographic legacies has brought her to work with a number of archives. From 1997 to 2003 she was assistant director on Contacts -a French documentary film series exploring the work methods of established photographers. Monfort’s other documentary projects include North High School, Iowa, 1999: Revisiting notions of identity, alienation and belonging in America at the turn of the century; Methamphetamine Addiction in the American Heartland, Kansas, 2004 and the Bronx Riviera: a cultural love affair.

Bedrich Grunzweig
American, b. Prague, 1910 – 2009
Archive contact: Ruth Grunzweig Roth 212.838.9368 GrunzweigPhotography@Ymail.com
Vintage prints: Margit Erb, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City 212.334.0010 margit@howardgreenberg.com

Bedrich Grunzweig was born in 1910 in Prague and grew up in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Following university studies and service in the Czech army, he took an administrative post in a sugar mill. In 1939, he escaped from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia with his first wife, Judith Winterstein. His grandmother, parents and older brother, Hans, were all murdered by the Nazis. Bedrich’s first photograph, made in 1926, was a portrait of Hans.

Arriving in the U.S., he settled permanently in New York City, whose architectural forms, visual excitement and relentless pace would inform and inspire his photography throughout his life. Following a job at the Czech Pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair and service with the wartime Czech government-in-exile, he joined the newly formed United Nations where he worked until his retirement in 1974. In each case, he worked in the field of communications, media and public information. In 1961, he served for nine months in a leadership role at the UN peace-keeping operation in the Congo.

Since the 1940s, Bedrich Grunzweig had been photographing life in a wide range of locations, with a particular interest in his adopted hometown, New York City. His best known images include “Between Heaven and Earth,” a spectacular shot of a window cleaner at the United Nations building which won U.S. Camera magazine’s first prize in 1951, as well as being published in Popular Photography’s 1952 Annual and in the 1952 Annual of American Photography.

In 1964, he won the Saturday Review first prize for his photograph of architect Eero Saarinen’s ground breaking TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport. In 1973 his work was exhibited at the solo show “Return to Prague: A Personal Sojourn” at the Jewish Museum in New York City and at the Koffler Centre for the Arts in Toronto.

After retirement from the UN, Grunzweig became adviser to International Center of Photography (ICP) founder and director, Cornell Capa, from 1974 to 1994. He worked with new photographers, curated photo exhibits and, in 1984, was invited by the ICP to exhibit a one-man show of his photos. Describing Grunzweig’s work, Cornell Capa said, “Through his life span, he has seen much. He has gentle humor, and great sensitivity to the human tragedy.”

Grunzweig returned to Prague, the city of his birth, three times between 1969 and 1983 and again in 1991 and in 1998. This last visit marked the opening of the one-man retrospective show “Between Heaven and Earth”, Grunzweig’s first exhibit in the city of his birth.

In his later years, Grunzweig had a solo show at New York’s Leica Gallery and a solo retrospective of his New York City photographs at John Stevenson Gallery. His photograph, “Home From Work” was featured on the exhibit poster for the 1998 retrospective “Eight Million Stories: 20th-Century New York Life in Prints and Photographs from the New York Public Library”. Grunzweig ‘s work continues to be represented by New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery.

In addition to documenting life in New York City, Grunzweig traveled and photographed in diverse locations, including the American Rockies, Congo, Czech Republic, Israel, Vermont, Toronto, Mexico, and more.

His work can be found in the collections of numerous museums and institutions, including the New York Public Library, the United Nations Photography Archives, The Museum of Modem Art (New York-NYC), the Metropolitan Museum (NYC), the International Center of Photography (NYC), the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (NYC), the Seagram’s Photo Collection (NYC), the Library for the Performing Arts (NYC), the Jewish Museum (NYC), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), the University of Haifa, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (Tel Aviv), and the Moravian Museum. He is listed in the Auer & Auer and George Eastman House databases.

Bedrich Grunzweig died on February 21, 2009, just short of his 99th birthday. He is survived by his wife Ann Roudebush Grunzweig, daughter Ruth Grunzweig Roth, grandsons S. Adam Roth and A. Daniel Roth and son-in-law, J. Lipa Roth.

Sol Prom is the photographer pen name of Solomon Fabricant (1906 – 1989). He joined the New York Photo League when he was in his early 30s while he was working on his doctorate in Economics at Columbia University. A serious amateur photographer, he was typical of most members of the Photo League–a first generation Jewish-American who had attended public school and City College before going on to graduate school.

Throughout his life, both early on in his photographs, and later as a prominent economist, he was concerned about the human condition and was committed to bringing about social reform. Starting as a research assistant, he rose to become Director of Research at the National Bureau of Economic Research where he did pioneering research on the measurement of productivity. He was also a Professor of Economics at New York University and served on many private and governmental commissions and boards.

He was a member of the Photo League between 1936 and 1939 and worked with the Feature group on three projects: “Park Avenue North and South”, “Dead End: the Bowery”, and “Harlem Document.” Having a life-long interest in photography, Prom remained an amateur photographer throughout the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s using his home darkroom. From then on, subject matter was primarily family and people and sights on travels throughout the world.

In the 30’s and early 40’s, his Harlem Document photos, as well as those of other members of Aaron Siskind’s Feature Group, were exhibited and published widely. More recent exhibits including his work have been at the National Gallery of Canada, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Art of the University of Iowa, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, the Columbus Museum of Art, OH, and, at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City. In addition, he was represented in “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951”, an exhibit cosponsored by the Jewish Museum and the Columbus Museum of Art. His work from the Photo League years is in private collections as well as in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, OH, and the Jewish Museum, New York City. Prom is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and, a website devoted to his photography can be found at www.solpromphotography.com.