Sometimes Overwhelming door Arlene Gottfried (Fotograaf) powerHouse Books (2008), Edition: First Edition, 120 pages |
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By William Grimes
Aug. 10, 2017
Arlene Gottfried, whose arresting images of ordinary people in New York’s humbler neighborhoods earned her belated recognition as one of the finest street photographers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 66.
Her brother, the comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried, said the cause was complications of breast cancer.
Ms. Gottfried roamed the streets of New York, camera in hand, finding opportunity at every corner. Much of her work recorded the daily routines and local characters in the city’s Puerto Rican areas, where cultural exuberance coexisted with poverty and urban blight.
In one of her most celebrated images, a nun leads a group of Roman Catholic schoolgirls in Communion dresses down a trash-strewn street lined with old cars, one of them with a plugged-in television set on the hood tuned to a western.
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She photographed a gospel choir in Harlem; followed a club dancer and former convict known as Midnight as he declined into mental illness, a journey recorded in her book “Midnight” (2003); and turned her lens on her own family in her mother’s final years for the photo essay “Mommie,” published last year.
She struck pay dirt on a nude beach in Jacob Riis Park in 1980, when a Hasidic Jew, dressed in black hat and overcoat on a scorching summer day, unexpectedly appeared. A nude bodybuilder approached and asked her to take a picture of the two together “because,” he said, “I’m Jewish.” She obliged. The unforgettable photo shows a flexing nude, smiling proudly, next to his thoroughly nonplused and emphatically clothed companion.
Ms. Gottfried’s subjects were never specimens, held up for cold examination. She was part documentarian, part social worker, a warm and sometimes lingering presence in the lives she recorded. She spent 20 years with Midnight and ended up joining the gospel choir that was the subject of her first book, “The Eternal Light,” published in 1999.
“How her eye captures people, and how she touches them, that’s hard to explain,” her brother told The Guardian in 2014. “Someone else couldn’t see the funny or odd or touching thing, and capture it. Kind of like how a singer can have a great song, but not know how to sing it. She’s able to do that.”
Ms. Gottfried is prominently featured in a documentary film about her brother, “Gilbert,” scheduled to open in November.
Arlene Harriet Gottfried was born on Aug. 26, 1950, in Brooklyn. She spent her early childhood in Coney Island, living above the hardware store that her father, Max, ran with his brother, Seymour. Her mother, the former Lillian Zimmerman, was a homemaker.
When Arlene was 9 the family moved to Crown Heights, whose growing Puerto Rican population captured her imagination. In later years she took the cry of a Puerto Rican street vendor, selling cod fritters and fireworks on the Fourth of July, as the title of her book “Bacalaitos & Fireworks” (2011), an unvarnished but loving look at Puerto Rican life on the Lower East Side and in Spanish Harlem.
“It was a mixture of excitement, devastation and drug use,” she told The New York Times in 2016, describing the scenes she recorded. “But there was more than just that. It was the people, the humanity of the situation. You had very good people there trying to make it.”
When she was in her teens, her father gave her an old camera, and she began taking pictures as she walked around the neighborhood, a habit that became a career. “We lived in Coney Island, and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture,” she told The Guardian.
Ms. Gottfried took photography courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan because, she once explained, she did not want to listen to lectures or do homework. After leaving the school, she found work doing commercial photography at an advertising agency.
In the mid-1970s she began a freelance career in which her work sporadically appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Fortune and Life.
She discovered a second life as a gospel singer in the 1990s. Selwyn Rawls, the director of the Eternal Light Community Singers in Harlem, invited her to join the choir. Belting out songs of praise, she began appearing with choirs at gospel festivals and eventually emerged as a soloist. Most recently, she sang with the Jerriese Johnson Gospel Choir.
In addition to her brother, she is survived by a sister, Karen Gottfried.
Although well known to photographers and photo editors, Ms. Gottfried remained unknown to the larger public for most of her career. That changed when her black-and-white work from the 1970s and ’80s, some of it collected in her book “Sometimes Overwhelming” (2008), caught the wave of interest in the gritty, dangerous New York of yesteryear. An exhibition at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in 2014 attracted the attention of the national news media and led to shows in France and Germany.
The attention seemed to startle her, since she described her vocation in modest terms. “I think I wander around and I see things that just speak to me, in one way or another,” she told Time magazine in 2011. “There are things that you try to say something about, or a moment you want to hold.”
By Aline Smithson November 4, 2014
I remember discovering Arlene Gottfried’s work five or six years ago and became an immediate devotee as I explored her chronicling of New York City in all it’s incarnations. She has visited every nook and cranny of all five boroughs and some of my favorite work is from the 1970’s and 1980’s when the city was at it’s most outrageous. 42nd Street was not the Disneyland that it is today, the east village was a landscape of heroin dealers and burned out buildings, and the city provided an ever changing stage for behavior and dress that fit perfectly with the climate of drugs, sexuality, and punk rock/disco. As a witness to the city for decades, Arlene is New York’s national photographic treasure and is opening her first solo exhibition with Daniel Cooney Fine Art. The exhibition, Sometimes Overwhelming, features work that chronicles the people and landscape of New York City in the 1970’s and 80’s with classic black and white photography. Opening November 6th, the exhibition will run through December 20th. The exhibition will feature approximately 30 vintage prints of images made in Brooklyn, Soho, the Lower East Side, Riis Beach, Rikers Island, Central Park, Coney Island and other parts of the city that Gottfried traveled to for work and play.
Arlene Gottfried, born in Brooklyn, graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and worked as a photographer at an ad agency before freelancing for top publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, and The Independent in London. Gottfried has exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and in Tokyo, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., among others. Her photographs can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Berenice Abbott International Competition of Women’s Documentary Photography. Gottfried is the author of Bacalaitos & Fireworks (powerHouse Books, 2011), Sometimes Overwhelming (powerHouse Books, 2008), Midnight (powerHouse Books, 2003) and The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999). A lecturer and a teacher, Gottfried lives and works in New York City.
Veterans Day Parade, 1978 ©Arlene Gottfried
Angel and Woman on Boardwalk, Brighton Beach, 1976 ©Arlene Gottfried
Family with Baby in Car, Coney Island, 1976 ©Arlene Gottfried
Kissing on the Highway, Queens, 1980 ©Arlene Gottfried
Doorway in Soho, 1980 ©Arlene Gottfried
Riis Nude Bay, Queens, 1980 ©Arlene Gottfried
Guy with Radio, East 7th St, 1977 ©Arlene Gottfried
Platform Boots, Madison Sq Garden, 1977 ©Arlene Gottfried
Isabel Croft Jumping Rope, 1972 ©Arlene Gottfried
Lloyd Steir and Dogs at Big Apple Circus, 1976 ©Arlene Gottfried
Eddie Sun’s Friend Ironing, 1972 ©Arlene Gottfried
Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, 1977 ©Arlene Gottfried
KISS, Halloween Parade, 1978 ©Arlene Gottfried
Voor de dansvloer is niemand te oud
Joyce Roodnat
24 augustus 2017
Op de Amsterdamse Lijnbaansgracht raak ik aan de praat met een stel vrouwen en voor ik het weet, sta ik te deinen op de rap van de IJslandse meidengroep Reykjavíkurdaetur. Want ze wezen op de entree van een club: we treden hier op, kom mee! Het IJslands blijkt dichterlijk als de pest, hun rap maakt gehakt van het machismo dat mannetjes-rap zo onuitstaanbaar maakt. Ik geniet.
Toeval is goud waard.
Ik ga op de bonnefooi naar het Amsterdamse Concertgebouw en koop een kaartje. Het Metropole Orkest. Dat speelt vanavond dance. Dance? Ik hoor iets dat in de trant van de nerveuze filmmuziek uit de jaren 60, toen James nog vuig was en Bond nog Connery. Shaken not stirred. Lekkere avond.
Toeval doet wonderen.
In een vlaag van uitstelgedrag zwerf ik over het internet, waar ik struikel over een foto van een naakte bodybuilder en een verlegen chassidische Jood, poserend in het zand van een strand. Daardoor lees ik de necrologie van Arlene Gottfried, een New Yorkse straatfotograaf. Ze overleed op 8 augustus, ze was pas 66. Wat een grandioos mens, hoe kan het dat ik haar niet ken?
Het toeval leverde te laat. Pas nu heb ik weet van haar en nu is ze dood. Nu wil ik een tentoonstelling zien, dit kunstseizoen nog, alstublieft. Nu wil ik haar boeken hebben. Bij een antiquariaat vind ik Sometimes Overwhelming – goeie titel, dat is wat haar foto’s doen: ze overdonderen. Niet soms maar steeds. Het kwam in 2008 uit, bij uitgeverij Mets & Schilt.
Ik bel met uitgever Maarten Schilt. Hij werd jaren terug gegrepen door Gottfried, vertelt hij. „Net als jij: ik zag een foto van haar en ging omver”. Hij zocht haar op: „Ze was als haar foto’s. Lief. Onafhankelijk. En met een ragfijn gevoel voor de tijd.”
Op de laatste pagina’s van Sometimes Overwhelming staan foto’s van ballroomdansers op leeftijd. Bekend onderwerp, altijd wrang, met trieste types. Zo ziet Gottfried dat niet. Bij haar stralen de paren. Hier is niemand te oud voor de dansvloer.
