East Harlem: The Postwar Years - Hardcover

Goldstein, Leo; Coleman, A.D.; González, Juan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576879305 ISBN 13: 9781576879306

Publisher: powerHouse Books, 2019

Synopsis

Leo Goldstein's East Harlem body of work was made by the artist from about 1949 to the mid-1950s and represents an important addition to the photographic history of New York City.

The selected images in this book reflect the East Harlem community in the postwar years, which would later grow into a center of Puerto Rican culture and life in the U.S. From the families portrayed gathering on stoops, to the kids at their shoeshine stations, to youths playing ball, to anti-war posters on neighborhood walls, his images of East Harlem provide windows into the socio-economic, cultural and political landscapes of the time.

Goldstein's East Harlem photographs are gathered for the first time in this book edited by Régina Monfort. Until 2016, when the prints were catalogued, this body of work remained mostly untouched and unseen. There are no negatives in existence.

A small number of Leo's images from the East Harlem corpus have appeared in exhibits and publications of Photo League work, beginning with the seminal exhibit "This Is the Photo League" (1948-1949) and later in the book, This Was the Photo League, published in 2000. His work was included in "The Photo League, 1936-1951," an exhibition organized by Howard Greenberg at the Photofind Gallery in Woodstock, NY in 1985. One of Leo's images was also included in the 2011-12 exhibit at the Jewish Museum entitled "The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951."

The publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

About this title

About the Author

Leo Goldstein was born in 1901 in Kishinev in the Bessarabian(Moldava) region of Czarist Russia. Fleeing the pogroms, his family settled in New York City in 1906. He was the fourth child of 13 and went to work at a young age to help support the family. Leo was a talented amateur sculptor and artist, taking up photography when he joined the Photo League in the late 1940s. Goldstein embraced the social documentary tradition of the League and was influenced by legendary members Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, and Berenice Abbott, among others. He died in New York City in 1972. Leo Goldstein's work is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Juan González is an award-winning broadcast journalist and investigative reporter. A two-time winner of the George Polk Award, he is co-host of Democracy Now!, author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, and a founder and past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is currently the Richard D. Heffner Professor in Communications and Public Policy at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. González was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1947 and lived as a child in East Harlem.

About this edition

• Publisher: powerHouse Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1576879305
• ISBN 13: 9781576879306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160