Sing for your snapper: a life-affirming view of New York

The Guardian

30-04-2025

Laurence Cornet, curator: 'I love this photograph that could be a self-portrait by Arlene. The singer in the photograph conveys the same warmth and full engagement. Arlene got so deeply involved with gospel that she really became one of them. She had this look and face that could make people believe that she belongs to any community – black American, Puerto-Rican, Jewish, all communities she spent a lot of time with. Also, it's a Cibachrome print, which Arlene used for most of her colour work. It's so rare to see Cibachrome nowadays. I'm nostalgic for their bright and dense colours'
Gottfried's first photographs are of life on the streets, showing her friends, relatives and neighbours in the ethnically diverse area of Brooklyn she lived in. The photographs from the 1970s and 80s document a part of New York City that no longer exists: a rough environment where she gravitated towards individuals with unique characteristics and large personalities
In the 1970s and 80s, New York was the scene of irresistible social diversity, revealing a gallery of people, each more eccentric than the last
'This image always reminds me of one by Robert Frank. Gottfried's work, like Frank's, is characteristic of the American interpretation of street photography that, while being focused on people, gives a sense of its vastness and chaos. She didn't intend to draw a portrait of NYC, but her images are nonetheless documents of a vanished city, before the speculation bubble hit'
Having grown up in the working-class neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, first on Coney Island and then in the Latino and Afro-American barrio of Crown Heights, Gottfried had been close to this reality since childhood, spontaneously turning to her neighbours when she received her first camera from her father
Although Gottfried initially chose photography because she 'couldn't stand still in a classroom', she soon turned it into a full-time activity. Gottfried criss-crossed the metropolis, a camera around her neck, documenting what touched her: the figures in her community, whom she met every day, her friends, the clubs, the provocative extravagance that preceded the wave of Aids scares and gospel music, which she soon took up with as much fervour as photography'
Gottfried returned to the beaches of her childhood, Coney Island and Brighton Beach, photographing the only nude bay in New York, Riis Beach's Bay One. She also shot clubs and disco nights that had a sense of wild and free self-expression in a world before Aids
Gottfried's benevolence can be seen in the looks on people's faces, image after image. 'Everyone was so relaxed at the idea of being photographed,' she once explained
Often, they were the ones who asked her to do it, like the muscular nudist posing next to an Orthodox Jew
Laurence Cornet: 'These two women are Arlene's mother and grandmother. They systematically kissed each other on the mouth when they greeted each other goodbye. Family was very important for Gottfried. She granted her upbringing for her love of others, for the fact that she felt comfortable with everyone. It's also her mother who first called her a 'singing photographer', an expression that appeared on Arlene's business card and that gives its title to the exhibition'
Each slice of this portrait of New York is a story, an intimate memory of Gottfried, the people she met and the places she loved
Laurence Cornet: 'Kerouac said that Robert Frank 'sucked a sad poem out of America'. Gottfried did quite the opposite. She doesn't avoid or hide the poor and the rough conditions in which they live, but she engaged with them in such a generous way that her photographs are an invitation to look and care for each other. That is one of the aspects that has motivated the exhibition, at a time when the political situation tends to divide people'
We are free to look at these images with nostalgia for a bygone era, or to study them as historical documents. Despite being rooted in an era, they remain timeless, charged as they are with humour and tenderness. An altruistic ode sung in images