Charles Cushman was a statistician, not a professional photographer.
But he clearly had an eye for the enchanting and poetic. As he traveled the country from the 1930s to the 1960s, he took photos—many in color, bringing scenes we’re used to seeing in stark black and white in gorgeous, enchanting hues.
Many of his color photos capture ordinary street scenes in New York in the early 1940s. Here, some salvage collectors on a Lower East Side street in October 1941 recycle the old-fashioned way.
Born in a Hester Street flat to Russian immigrant parents, Rebecca Lepkoff came of age during the Depression—and became a keen observer of street life in her Lower East Side neighborhood.
“I really enjoyed all the people and what they were doing. I was into loving the streets,” she told the Daily News in an interview last March. “Everyone was outside: the mothers with their baby carriages, and the men just hanging out. The apartment houses were too small to stay inside.”
A member of the New York Photo League, a photographer’s cooperative, Lepkoff gained a rep for her tender glimpses of mid-century life between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges: a world of El trains and corner stores, of pushcart vendors and laundry lines.
Her portraits of children entertaining themselves on front stairs and sidewalks capture something lost in contemporary New York: a freedom kids used to have to create and explore without being watched by adults.
“The kids played in the street,’” she told the Daily News. “They didn’t stay home. There weren’t many playgrounds. So they made up their own games, and they’d find sticks and whatever.”
Lepkoff still takes pictures, and her work is enjoying more notoriety, thanks to recent exhibits at the Tenement Museum and the Jewish Museum.
Through January 4, some of her work can be seen at the Lower East Side Jewish Conservatory‘s exhibit “On the Cusp of Change: The LES, 1935-1975.”
[Photos copyright Rebecca Lepkoff]
Ephemeral New York 