Sometimes Overwhelming: New York City People in the 1970s and 80s by Arlene Gottfried

“My mother used to say ‘Arlene – just don’t wander!’ 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.”

–  Arlene Gottfried

New Yorker Arlene Gottfried (August 26, 1950 – August 8, 2017) walked around her city taking pictures of people she met. We see clubbers in Midtown, life and  survival on the Lower East Side, holidaymakers on Coney Island and nudists on Riis Beach.

This is no clandestine street photography. Gottfried was making connections. Her subjects are seen looking at her. You can feel the warmth. When her father gave her an old 35 mm camera, which she took to Woodstock, she recalls, “I had no clue what I was doing”. But she knew how to communicate. “We lived in Coney Island,” she recalled, “and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture.”

 

Arlene Gottfried was born in Coney Island to Jewish parents Lillian (Zimmerman) and Max Gottfried. Live revolved around the family-run hardware store, above which Arlene lived with her mum, dad and two siblings. The family moved to Crown Heights in 1959, and in the 1970s Arlene lived alone in Alphabet City and the Lower East Side.

A graduate from the city’s Fashion Institute of Technology, Arlene found work as a photographer for an advertising agency. “I did everything: printing, processing, lighting, studio work, on location, a lot of it was for comps and sometimes it was for the ad itself, for sales promotion and point of purchase,” she revealed in her book Mommie. “I didn’t always love what it was about but I always took photographs on the weekend and used their fantastic darkroom.”

She went on to freelance for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life and the Village Voice. She published five books of her work, including Sometimes Overwhelming (2008), a compilation of her photographs taken in 1970s and 1980s New York, some of which we can see here.

 

“It was very diverse. It still is in some respects, you see a lot of different people, but it’s not the same. It’s almost impossible to describe how it was and the new New York City, how it evolved to what it is now, we’ve lost so many little businesses that gave it color. You used to know the people who ran the shops and there was a lot more grit and interesting textural backgrounds for all the different kinds of people you saw on the street.”

– Arlene Gottfried

 

“If I wanted to take a picture, I would just ask the people. I don’t do it as much now; now I just shoot and don’t ask people, but back then they were looking right at me and they were close to me so they were in agreement obviously!”

 

“It was a mixture of excitement, joy, and warmth. There was this striking beauty the people had.”

– Arelene Gottfried

 

 

“It’s nice to be young and be able to run across the beach like wild and be able to meet people and take their picture,” she continued. “That’s what I remember about it: Having a great time, and having a job so I could pay for things, and having a darkroom where I could print everything. You couldn’t ask for anything better. It was like a little grant at a little job, you know, a moderate income but just enough.”

– Arelene Gottfried

 

“The clubs were very provocative then: People putting on these shows, taking their clothes off, acting things out. There’d be a theme and they’d be doing all kinds of crazy things like giving birth to dolls, simulating sex in public. I went in with my camera, took photographs and it was great.”

– Arlene Gottfried

 

Via: Powerhouse books, Daniel Cooney