Tag: Arlene Gottfried

Hailing from Coney Island, Arlene Gottfried (1950-2017) grew up on the streets of Crown Heights during the 1960s just as white flight was reshaping the face of New York. She moved to Greenwich Village in 1972 as a young photography student enrolled at Fashion Institute of Technology and soon thereafter her family moved to the East Village when it was more familiarly known as Alphabet City — one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Arlene Gottfried (1950–2017) was a paradox of the best kind: the infinitely shy artist who can blow the roof off the joint while singing gospel, or approach any person in order to take their photo. Hailing from Brooklyn, Gottfried spent her childhood in Coney Island where all kinds of characters loomed near and far.

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.)

When I first came across Arlene Gottfried’s vintage pictures of Puerto Rican New York, “Bacalaitos & Fireworks,” I chuckled. Her reference to the siren call of a Lower East Side street vendor hawking codfish fritters and firecrackers struck me as having all the ingredients for a Fourth of July party (just add Bacardi). My second reaction was nervousness — given the area’s devastation from poverty and drugs during the 1970s and 1980s, how would the photographer portray this world?

With love and humor, it turns out.