Sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, the New York photographer Arlene Gottfried had a knack for taking photographs that, if not quite as willfully transgressive as Arbus’s, nonetheless come off as uncanny and surprising. One memorable snap was taken on Riis Beach (AKA “the People’s Beach”) in Queens, showing a Hasidic Jew in full dress standing beside a naked, flexing bodybuilder carefully posed to hide his genitals. Gottfried just couldn’t resist the juxtaposition of two very different men – both Jewish – who happened to be among the cross-section of humanity at the beach that afternoon.
That’s the energy that Gottfried exudes – her work draws you in, but at the same time makes you feel a little sheepish for looking. The New York Historical is currently exhibiting about 30 of Gottfried’s photographs, offering a chance to explore the work of an inimitable artist who shows a very different side of New York. The show, titled Picture Stores, draws on around 300 prints of Gottfried’s that are held in the institution’s archives, offering a rare and valuable look at one of New York’s best photographers.
Although Gottfried was formally trained in photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked professionally with her camera, she was still a maverick, seeking out neighborhoods most wouldn’t dare to enter, taking shots that few others could. “A lot of photographers will go for the glamor,” said the exhibition curator Marilyn Kushner, “and she did do a little of that, but she was mostly out on the streets.”
Gottfried was prodigious, leaving behind some 15,000 photos when she died in 2017 of breast cancer. She produced five books in her lifetime and exhibited widely, frequently publishing her work in outlets like the Village Voice and the New York Times. Despite not being a member of either, Gottfried delved deeply into the LGBTQ+ and Black communities; she was also known as “the Singing Photographer” after she trained as a gospel singer and joined the choir the Eternal Light, which she also photographed thoroughly.
Photo by photo, what comes across in Gottfried’s work is a sense of being in the middle of something. There is often a feeling of crashing in on someone else’s intimacy, and also of being present at a “you won’t believe what I just saw” kind of happening. A good example of both, drawn from Picture Stories, is a shot of the superfreak himself Rick James in full regalia, striking a bold, space-taking pose and looking over his shoulder at two genteel women in furs who seem taken aback by the encounter. It’s pure Gottfried – at once absurd, private, psychological, urban and just a step away from combusting.
Gottfried had a knack for capturing moments like that, a seemingly effortless ability to find herself in situations that the average person might be lucky to run across just a handful of times, if ever. Kushner credits Gottfried’s knack for taking one uncanny photo after another to her personality, which could charm virtually anyone. “She gravitated to her own kind of a person,” Kushner told me, “and she had a remarkable ability to make people warm up to her.”
That is no doubt partly due to growing up in a very boisterous family, which included her younger brother, the raucous comedian Gilbert Gottfried. Gottfried was also remarkably energetic, with a seemingly boundless passion for life – her close friend Midnight once recalled: “Arlene had a Rolodex, a million friends, and invites every night.” Kusher echoed that sentiment: “Her energy was almost intense. It was an inner intensity that came out in the way she lived her life and the people she photographed.”
This intensity is plain to see in the many videos available on YouTube of Gottfried singing gospel. In one she belts it out for a crowd in Central Park, caught up in the currents of sound and swaying to her own rhythm, joyously lost in her own ecstatic world. She was able to imbue that energy into her photographic subjects, to help them momentarily get caught up in their own passion and let it out long enough for Gottfried to capture it on film.
Gottfried’s remarkable energy also stemmed from her upbringing in 1950s-era Coney Island, where she was able to encounter a strange assortment of humanity just by wandering her neighborhood. True to those formative experiences, Gottfried’s photographic menagerie has a circus-like atmosphere – the prints in Picture Stories range from an almost cinematic shot of a group of young men in Harlem standing atop an upturned vehicle, to a fire-eater in nothing but briefs consuming a flame in a men’s bathroom, two people lying on one another and making out in a field just off the highway, and an intimate self-portrait of herself and Midnight, a man with schizophrenia whom she befriended in the 80s, eventually taking enough photos across two decades to fill an entire book.
There are also quiet moments in Picture Stories, such as a shot of the actor Ann Magnuson sitting in a stairwell looking off into eternity, and a beautiful one of a little girl named Monet, eyes wide, face expectant, awkwardly clutching a doll. As it turned out, Gottfried took the last ever photos of that little girl – just a week later she was murdered by her mother’s lover (Gottfried would photograph the girl’s funeral). The girl’s mother, Monique, turned out to be a deeply touching presence in Gottfried’s life – connections such as that one, or her friendship/romance with her longtime subject Midnight, show just how much of herself Gottfried poured into her photography.
Picture Stories is a lovely introduction to Gottfried’s work, and it will hopefully inspire many to seek out more of her photographs elsewhere. Kushner hopes it’s also a chance to make the acquaintance of a truly remarkable woman. “I’m excited to bring her here and show those parts of New York that pulled her in,” said Kushner. “I want people to come and see the soul of a photographer, to understand who she was. I want them to see the beauty that she found in places where people don’t see a lot of beauty.”
Picture Stories: Photographs by Arlene Gottfried is on display at the New York Historical from 31 January to 25 May
