Leo Goldstein was born in 1901 in Kishinev in Bessarabia, an Eastern European region of Czarist Russia. Fleeing the pogroms, his family first settled on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1906. Leo was the fourth of 13 children and went to work at an early age to help support the large family. As a young man he studied sculpting and was a talented amateur artist, taking up photography when he joined the Photo League in the late 1940s.
He threw himself into the social documentary tradition of the League, turning his lens, as many of the League members did, to the migrant and poor communities in New York City. He was greatly influenced by the work of Paul Strand, Lewis Hine and Berenice Abbott, among other members.
Beginning in 1949, and over several years, Leo photographed in East Harlem using a Rolleiflex twin-lens camera that he had bought second hand. Because his family had lived in East Harlem for a time as part of an earlier generation of migrants, Leo was familiar with the streets, the tenements, and the building stoops where neighbors gathered to sit, talk, and watch their children play. He lived in an apartment building on West 83rd Street and built a darkroom in the basement where he developed all his negatives. Leo’s son Fred remembers that his father worked very hard on the printing process, printing his images over and over again to get the light and dark areas just as he wanted them. Leo believed that developing and printing his own photographs was as much a part of his creative process as taking the picture itself.
In addition to East Harlem, Leo photographed in Mexico and Guatemala in the 1960s. He was close to Paul Strand and kept in touch with him after the League was disbanded. Strand’s influence on Leo was clear in the portraits he took of people in Mexico. Leo also took a series of photographs in the Vermont countryside during the same period. An interest in preserving a record of some of the beautiful buildings in New York City neighborhoods led him to photograph a series of buildings in Brooklyn, NY. The latter body of work is now housed in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York.
In the late 1960s, Leo began a major project to photograph stone carvings on old buildings, mainly on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he lived. As an amateur sculptor himself, Leo was particularly concerned about preserving these artistic expressions, which might be destroyed as part of the process of gentrification in the city. He was working toward the publication of a book of these images when he became ill and died. Following Leo’s death in 1972, none of his negatives could be found. They may have been discarded when his darkroom was dismantled. This illustrates how little was known about the value of the work at that time.
A small number of Leo’s images 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 by the Stephen Daiter Gallery and John Cleary Gallery in 2001. 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.”
— Naomi Goldstein