The Photographer Who Captured New York’s Fabulous Unknowns

Arlene Gottfried was drawn to everyday folks who sparkled with the flair of performers. And through her eyes, New York took on the excitement of a circus. In her heyday, during the 1970s and 1980s, she prowled the city with her camera, finding colorful characters who responded with a knowing urban gaze. Typically, they were Black, Puerto Rican, Jewish, gay. In the neighborhoods where she lived and hung out — the Lower East Side, East Harlem, Crown Heights, Coney Island and Greenwich Village — these groups mixed freely, brewing up a heady cocktail that intoxicated her, as can be seen in “Picture Stories: Photographs by Arlene Gottfried,” a small, tantalizing exhibition at the New York Historical, to commemorate its recent acquisition of nearly 300 of Gottfried’s photographs.

She arrived at the tail end of the comet of New York Street photography, a tradition blazed by many artists who have enjoyed greater recognition: Helen Levitt, Louis Faurer, Weegee, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz and Tod Papageorge. For about a decade, until she died in 2017 at age 66 of breast cancer, she lived in Westbeth, the subsidized artist residence in the West Village, which was also Arbus’s final home.

A native of Brooklyn, Gottfried earned a precarious freelance living. She possessed two essential skills: spotting intriguing people and winning their trust. Sometimes, also like Arbus, she maintained long-term relationships with her subjects, most significantly with a magnetic dancer and nightclub entertainer called Midnight, whose sad descent into schizophrenia she intimately recorded over 20 years.

She loved to depict the clothes that defined identities, especially if she found a fashion clash. When two soignée ladies in furs came face to face with Rick James, the funk-punk singer famous for his outrageous haberdashery, Gottfried captured the startled look of alarm on one woman’s face.

Probably her most famous photo, an only-in-New-York moment, depicts a heavily garbed Hasidic Jew who has somehow wandered onto a nudist beach at Jacob Riis Park, in Queens, only to be accosted by a stark-naked posing bodybuilder. Cheekily hilarious, it is included in a video but is not one of the 33 prints on the wall in “Picture Stories.”

A touching portrait she made around 1990, of a big-eyed, brown-skinned little girl holding a brown-skinned doll, led Gottfried to a sideline that, although tragically initiated, proved deeply satisfying. Shortly after she took the photograph, the child was murdered. Afterward, Gottfried began attending Sunday services at the Spanish Harlem church where the girl’s mother sang, and eventually joined the choir. A video of Gottfried performing a gospel number reveals that she was an extraordinary vocalist.

No matter how over-the-top her subjects were, Gottfried portrayed them without the slightest condescension or mockery. The older sister of the eccentric comedian Gilbert Gottfried, she felt comfortable with unconventional people, and they evidently reciprocated. She shot a portrait of a fire-eater practicing his act at a men’s bathroom in a disco. Looking at the two urinals behind him, you wonder, how did she make her way in there?

Gilbert’s widow, Dara Gottfried, cataloged the pictures in her sister-in-law’s archive and helped arrange the acquisition by the museum. The images document fabulous unknowns, New Yorkers who don’t belong to the elite and may be struggling to get by but are, at the moment Gottfried encounters them, emphatically enjoying their lives. Other than James, the closest thing to a celebrity in this show is a frequent Gottfried subject, Marsha P. Johnson, the gay activist and drag performer — a prominent figure in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 — who stands shoulder to shoulder with a shy boy holding roses.

Three young men with resplendent Afros pose by a Spanish Harlem tenement that has been adorned with a vibrant street mural. A self-confident older woman in a bathing suit and sneakers rests between two beachside boulders. A little boy is flamboyantly dressed for Halloween as a member of the band Kiss. The photographer’s delight in the people in front of her camera is transparent.

In a portrait that is emblematic of her art, Gottfried photographed a circus entertainer dressed in a top hat and white tie, accompanied by his two canine partners, also formally attired, the large Doberman pinscher in a white tie and a turban, the miniature pinscher with a frilly collar. The small dog is watchful, the big one is beaming. As for the man, he cracks a wry smile. He knows that it is all a little ridiculous, but he’s loving it.

Picture Stories: Photographs by Arlene Gottfried

Through May 25, The New York Historical, 170 Central Park West, Manhattan; 212 873-3400; nyhistory.org.