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Arlene Gottfried has been investigating life on the clamorous corners of New York City for four decades.She’s photographed lovers caressing on park benches, the homeless sleeping on subway seats, and choirs belting out gospel songs. She’s captured warm moments of daily life and those odd urban juxtapositions — a muscle-bound Puerto Rican man in a tiny swimming suit standing next to an elderly woman in Brighton Beach; a Hassidic man among the crowd at a nude beach in Far Rockaway — that make the city a smorgasbord for street photographers. As a photojournalist she has worked for Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune and other magazines and been admired by generations of photo editors. Yet in all those years of taking pictures and all the miles of New York sidewalks she has trod upon, she has never had the kind of attention she is getting now.
All of a sudden, Arlene Gottfried is hot.
“It takes a lifetime to be a new discovery, I guess,” she says.
Gottfried has recently been dubbed an “NYC treasure” by theGothamist and “a quiet storm of power” by Glitterati. Britain’sGuardian newspaper has praised the “intimacy and wry humor” of her work, while the AnOther blog described her photography as a “candid and captivating ode” to New York. Last fall she had a solo exhibition at the Hardhitta Gallery in Cologne, Germany, followed by a solo show on view now at Les Douches gallery in Paris. New York’s Daniel Cooney Fine Art gallery showed her street photography in a 2014 show that drew television crews and newspaper reporters from around the world and on March 3 will open another exhibition, this one featuring Gottfried’s photographs of New York’s Puerto Rican community. That work was originally collected in her 2011 book Bacalaitos & Fireworks.
