We’ve covered the history of New York many times, sharing rare and previously unseen pictures from all decades of the 20th Century. The city is a street photographer’s dream. Here we look at Sy Kattelson’s views of people in Manhattan taken around 1948.
The Bronx-born photographer, who studied with Sid Grossman and Paul Strand, and had a rich association with the Big Apple’s famed Photo League (1936-1951), would take his camera into Manhattan.
“When I go out to shoot I’m always looking for something, for a specific idea that I have. I wait until I find it. I don’t take a lot of photos. I try to put as much information as I can into each photo. That’s what interested me in reflections – in storefront windows and the windshields of cars. This eventually led me to the double exposures, and to the prints where I butt together two different images.”
– Sy Kattelson (February 11, 1923 – November 24, 2018)
“Most people doing that type of work were doing poverty-stricken people, like on the Lower East Side. I started to think, ‘What about people like me, who were not in poverty?’ So I tried to show people what they were living like.”…