What we’ve lost to gentrification
Arlene Gottfried’s photography is a lesson in being with people
Images don’t just document the way cities change; they inform and influence the process.
The ongoing development of New York City, to cite perhaps the most conspicuous example, is intimately tied to the way its working-class communities have been imaged and imagined since the 19th century. Jacob Riis’s photographs of a squalid Lower East Side in the late 1800s were the impetus behind early urban housing legislation and reform. Decades later, the Photo League, championing the power of images to have real social impact, took a communal approach to celebrating the city through socially conscious photography committed to progressive political causes. In the struggle for the soul of NYC, images can also hurt: many blame 1990s sitcoms like Friends and Sex in the City for the influx of educated young whites who flocked back to the five boroughs around the turn of the 20th century, reversing the trajectory of a previous generation’s “white flight” and quickening the process we now call gentrification.
Arlene Gottfried hailed from the kind of Jewish Brooklynites who’d never left. She learned photography the same way all New Yorkers learn about their city: by walking and talking.
“I think I wander around and I see things that just speak to me, in one way or another,” Gottfried told a journalist in 2011, on the eve of a major book release. “There are things that you try to say something about or a moment you want to hold.” She was sixty years old at the time of the interview, and her work had only recently started to become widely known. But even after toiling in relative obscurity for most of her life, Gottfried’s words burned with the humble intensity that characterizes her early work, much of it made as a twenty-something hanging out in the heavily Puerto Rican Lower East Side. “I really feel honored to have been there. There was so much sadness and loss. I think it was a very hard existence, and I was there, so I experienced a lot of that with them.”
It was in the Lower Manhattan of the 1970s, along with other neighborhoods like Harlem and Coney Island, that Gottfried was able to develop her rapport with the city’s street life — a multifaceted tableau of hardship and joy set amid the dramatic ruins of old New York. Those abandoned tenements, themselves the legacy of Jacob Riis’s muckraking so many years earlier, had been left to rot as the city spiraled economically. But while Riis was sometimes criticized for being unsympathetic to the nuances of working-class culture — wielding abject poverty as an obtuse instrument for change — Gottfried was using the camera to express something of her subjects’ inner vibrancy. It wasn’t necessarily a new kind of street photography, but it was distinct in its eye-to-eye treatment of people, as well as for obliterating the line between public and private. Gottfried saw her subjects as equals, whether picturing a chance encounter on the streets or the tender relationship between her own mother and grandmother. In this way, her work was progressive in both concept and practice.
Gottfried’s mother, Lillian, often chastised her daughter. “Arlene — don’t just wander!” she’d say. Lillian was right. Bringing a camera on those walks imbued her daughter’s ramblings — and life — with purpose.
Arlene Gottfried’s work is stunning for many reasons, color and intimacy being paramount. Her pictures are also often very funny. “The humor comes from being with the people,” Gottfried remarked in 2016, a year before her death at 66. Looking at her work, it’s clear that her subjects were as charmed by the woman making their picture as we are with them today.
Arlene Gottfried: A Lifetime of Wandering is on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York through April 28, 2018.
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