Arlene Gottfried’s New York, Through the Eyes of Her Brother, Gilbert Gottfried | The New Yorker

From the nineteen-seventies until her death last August, at the age of sixty-six, the photographer Arlene Gottfried combed New York City’s streets, parks, beaches, subways, and night clubs, in search of the shock of recognition one sometimes finds in perfect strangers. She understood the fractions of confidence and insecurity that make a public face. She liked sharp cheekbones and weird, pillowy proportions; she liked kids who comported themselves like adults, with laden, sphinx-like features. When Gottfried died, she left behind fifteen thousand pictures. (For her first posthumous exhibition, “A Lifetime of Wandering,” which is on view through the end of April, her gallerist, Daniel Cooney, has pored through her archive, selecting fifty photographs that capture her fantastic openness.)