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Sid Kaplan
Front of Dixon Cafeteria, NYC, 1955
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.206

Sid Kaplan was born in the South Bronx in 1938 and, at the age of ten, began a lifelong engagement with photography. For many years, he was known as one of the best darkroom printers in New York City, making prints for a who’s who of the photography world.
Yet Kaplan has also created an impressive archive of his own, with more than 90,000 images taken over five decades—the vast majority of them made in New York. This photograph of a shoeshine boy peering into a cafeteria with trays full of dessert exemplifies
the slice-of-life scenes that Kaplan caught with his camera on a daily basis.
 

Berenice Abbott
Stanton and Orchard Streets, 1936
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.1

Walter Rosenblum
Chick’s Candy Store, Pitt Street, NY, 1938
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.556

Dan Weiner
[Newspaper stand in snow], 1953
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.641

Ed Grazda
Main Street [From the series “Flushing Project”], 2002
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.175

Ken Heyman
Willie, 1962
Gelatin silver print
2020.10.196

Ken Heyman met noted anthropologist Margaret Mead while attending Columbia University. The two became friends and worked together on several projects; the experience influenced Heyman to focus his photography on human relationships and interactions. Heymen went on to become a leading photojournalist, working for Life, LOOK, and TIME magazines. In the mid-1950s Haymen photographed “Willie,” a four-year-old boy from Hell’s Kitchen, over the course of several months in an attempt to observe him negotiate his one-block world. The results were published in Heymen’s first book in 1962. He went on to publish 45 additional books, including collaborations with composer Leonard Bernstein, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and artist Andy Warhol.