Photography by Arlene Gottfried
Born in August of 1959 in Coney Island, New York, Arlene Gottfried was a photographer who recorded scenes of ordinary life in some of New York City’s more impoverished neighborhoods. At the age of nine, Arlene Gottfired’s family moved to the Crown Heights area where its Puerto Rican culture caught her attention and expanded her world view. Later in the 1970s, her family moved to the Alphabet City neighborhoods of the East Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Arlene Gottfried studied photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology where she was the only woman in her class. She later moved to Manhattan as a photographer for an advertising agency, where she did commercial work which at that time was a male-dominated profession. Switching to freelance work, Gottfried began shooting images for publications such as LIFE, the Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, CBS News, and London’s The Independent. Her freelance work gave her the time and opportunity to wander the streets, always carrying a camera, and shoot her images spontaneously.
Gottfried’s subjects are consistently depicted with a sense of intimacy and curiosity, in which strangers are indistinguishable from friends. In every frame, no matter how tough the subject matter, there is never a sense of detached irony or coolness. She approached all her subjects with careful empathy and directness.
Gottfried produced several series of importance including the 1991 “The Eternal Light” series on the Eternal Light Community Singers, a choral group on the Lower East Side which she later joined, and her 2016 series “Mommie”, her last collection and an epic compilation containing forty years of work documenting the women in her family. Gottfried, a frequent visitor of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, was accepted into the Nuyorican downtown culture and documented her close friend Midnight’s years-long struggle with mental health problems in her 2003 series “Midnight”.
In 2008, a retrospective of Gottfried’s earlier black and white work was published as “Sometimes Overwhelming” by PowerHouse Books. Her “Barcalaitos and Fireworks”, a collection of images of New York’s Puerto Rican community in the 1970s, inspired by its poetry and music, was published in 2011.
Through her life, Arlene Gottfried continued to capture the excitement of everyday life in New York City. She died from complications of breast cancer, surrounded by friends and family. in August of 2017 at her home. Gottfried’s photographs are held in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; The Jewish Museum; The Tang Teaching Museum, The North Carolina Museum of Art; and the New York Public Library.