- Boys and women, Sunday, East 102nd Street, East Harlem, c.1950
- Portrait of a girl, East Harlem, c.1949
- Girls playing on East 110th Street, East Harlem, 1952
- Three young men, East Harlem, c.1950
- Chico florist cart, East 100th Street, East Harlem, winter 1951
- Shopping day at La Marqueta, East Harlem, c.1950
leogoldsteinphotographycollection.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.