Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Remembering Arlene Gottfried, Chronicler Of New York’s Humanity

Arlene Gottfried called her grandma bubbie and sang in a gospel choir.

The Brooklyn-born photographer, who passed away on Tuesday August 8 at age 66, was a New Yorker to the core. She spent her childhood in Coney Island, then Crown Heights; in the 1990s, she moved to the Lower East Side, where the life of the local Puerto Rican community became a subject of fascination, and eventually the subject — alongside the Puerto Rican community in Spanish Harlem — of her 2011 book “Bacalaitos & Fireworks.”

Image by Arlene Gottfried/Courtesy of powerHouse Books

She went to all the places she wasn’t supposed to go: “My mother used to say ‘Arlene– just don’t wander!’” she told Time in 2011. “Then I started wandering, but I got a camera because it gave it a little more meaning…a life of wandering is really what it all is.”

Image by Arlene Gottfried/Courtesy of powerHouse Books

She had a knack for capturing images that showcased the strange contrasts of life in the city. In a 1980 photograph taken at the Rockaways’s Jacob Riis Park, a nude Jewish bodybuilder poses proudly next to a Hasidic man who looks into the lens with inquisitive directness. In a photograph published in “Bacalaitos & Fireworks,” a group of young girls in pristine, frilly white dresses march two-by-two down a trash-and-graffiti-ridden street, some looking in confusion towards the foreground, where a television set on top of a battered old car plays a blue-tinted Western.

Image by Arlene Gottfried/Courtesy of powerHouse Books

Everyone was interesting, especially when she could catch them in the sort of unplanned grace that is easy to see and difficult to translate into art. Her elderly grandmother leans forward to kiss her mother: See the brisk affection of the interaction, both women preparing for the kiss at the same time their bodies stretch to move on from it, the quiet affirmation of the unsentimental cityscape in which they so clearly feel at home, the grandmother’s folds of aging skin covering muscles and tendons captured in active, sharp definition.

Image by Arlene Gottfried/Courtesy of powerHouse Books

It’s hard not to focus on the sculpted, mostly naked form of a young man foregrounded in “Angel & Woman Brighton Beach.” Try, and be rewarded by a man lost mid-step on the beach below, looking as if he is comfortably going precisely nowhere, or the half-disbelieving, blurry grins of a group of beachgoers staring at Angel’s presumably shapely backside.

According to her brother, the comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Gottfried died of complications from breast cancer. In the week following her death, her sensitivity for the humanity in everything — not just humans, but the objects and landscapes they made their own — was easy to miss.

A white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a counter-protester reminded the country that days of hatred based on misinformed pre-conceptions are far from finished. The avenues of the city that Gottfried full-heartedly adored filled with marchers condemning a hatred-stoking president, ensconced in a gilded penthouse that could hardly be farther from the life of the streets. One longed for a time when a curly-haired Jewish Brooklyn girl stopped on the street, trained her camera on four laughing children playing school in an empty lot, and showed her audience a bleak environment refigured by a concentration of hope.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version