Keith de Lellis Gallery: Simpson Kalisher: Street Photography in New York – The Eye of Photography Magazine

Keith de Lellis Gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to Simpson Kalishera photographer who captured the endurance of urbanites, who died at age 96 earlier this year.
After a largely commercial career he joined the towering figures who defined an art form – street photography – in the 1950s and 1960s.

Simpson Kalisher, who freed his lens from the slick images of corporate reports and trade magazines to become a savvy photojournalist whose street scenes captured the panorama of American urban life in the 1950s and 1960s, died on April 13 June in Delray Beach, Florida. He was 96 years old.

A native of the Bronx, Mr. Kalisher “was one of the last survivors of that generation of dynamic New York street photographers born in the 1920s and employed first by magazines, a group that included Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand,” Lucy Sante, who wrote the foreword to Mr. Kalisher’s book “The Alienated Photographer” (2011), said in an email. “His most distinctive characteristic was his social empathy and imagination. »

The foreword described Mr. Kalisher as “our Virgil through this rapidly receding age, giving the impression in each image of remembering a stricter but richer past while also perceiving the broad outlines and perhaps be even the details of an anarchic future” through photographs that “seem to represent the culmination of a thousand thoughts that floated in the air”.

Describing an exhibition of Mr. Kalisher’s work at the Keith de Lellis gallery in Manhattan in 2011, the New Yorker wrote that it was grounded in an “atmospheric urban noir.”

“Kalisher worked mainly in the streets,” the magazine explains, “producing anecdotal photographs full of characters: a pugnacious child in front of a church, a driver sticking out his tongue, a tired guy pushing his broken down car. »

His photographs were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition “Family of Man” in 1955 and its 1978 exhibition “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960.”

Among his books were “Railroad Men (1961), which presents real-life portraits of the little-known workers who maintained the tracks and rolling stock when rail transportation was in decline. Mr. Kalisher also took notes of their memories, excerpts of which have been used in the accompanying text.

In her New York Times review of the book, Grace Glueck wrote: “From near-abstractions, like a nighttime view of wavy trails that appear as thin white lines on black paper, to an animated close-up of two men wearing striped caps. chattering in front of a counter, these skillfully captured images have a simple eloquence.”

Kalisher also published “Propaganda and Other Photographs” (1976), with an introduction by Russell Baker. The author later explained the challenge he faced in choosing which photos to include:

“Propaganda is a neutral word. There is no value judgment on the word Propaganda. He who advocates peace is no less a propagandist than he who advocates war. This made me wonder if it would be possible to create a book that illustrated propaganda in all the ways we see it every day, but somehow, through selection and sequencing , which would clearly express my own point of view.”

The art historian Ian Jeffrey described Mr. Kalisher as “a brutal parodist of pictorial stereotypes.”

Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture, the photography magazine for which Mr. Kalisher was regional editor in the 1960s, distinguished him from the coterie of talented colleagues whose ranks he joined.

“The fact that Kalisher was able to establish an individual voice among these towering figures is remarkable,” she said in an email, “especially since he was (to a greater extent than these peers) frequently involved in commercial projects at a time when such assignments were often seen as harming or limiting a photographer’s ability to establish an independent vision.”

Simpson Kalisher was born July 27, 1926, the son of Benjamin and Sheva (Ruskolenker) Kalisher, immigrants from Poland. His father was a jeweler and watchmaker, his mother a seamstress.

Raised in the Northeast Bronx, he graduated from Christopher Columbus High School. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington for a year before being drafted and serving in the Army from 1944 to 1946. After World War II, he completed his graduate studies at Queens College, where he majored in history and earned a bachelor’s degree.

Some of his first published photographs appeared in The Times in 1947 with an article by a former professor who returned to the Bloomington campus to compare the differences between freshmen and those who arrived in 1941, before the war. ‘America.

Becoming a photography enthusiast at the age of 10 and selling his first prints as a teenager, Mr. Kalisher initially dabbled in commercial photography.

He worked freelance for the Scope Associates agency in the early 1950s. A photo he took for a client of the company, the Texas Company (now Texaco), of two women in aprons chatting at the door of a house, was chosen by photographer Edward Steichen for MoMA’s “Family of Man” exhibition.

Mr. Kalisher’s photographs have appeared in corporate annual reports, industry magazines and advertisements. But even when getting into photojournalism, he had monetary motivations in mind.

“When I decided to make photojournalism my career, I was less interested in creating art than in making a living,” he recalled in an unpublished memoir he wrote for his family. Some of his photos have appeared in popular periodicals like Sports Illustrated and Fortune.

While traveling the world, he learned to fly a plane, he told his family, because he trusted his own skills rather than those of pilots he didn’t know.

Besides his daughter, he had two sons, David and Allon, all three from his marriage to Colby Harris, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren. He lived in Delray Beach.

His partner of 27 years, Gloria Richards, died in 2021. His eldest son, Jesse Kalisher, also a photographer, from his marriage to Ilse Kahn, which also ended in divorce, died in 2017.

Kalisher lived in New York and Connecticut and retired to Florida in 2013.

In his memoir, he sought to define the line between taking photos and creating art in a world where photographs had become ubiquitous.

Photojournalism in the late 1940s and early 1950s “lacked the values ​​I hoped to express in my own work,” he explains, largely because “magazine photographs served only to illustrate the texts that actually told the story.”

“Photography is difficult only because it is so easy,” he writes, before explaining why this is not the case.

“For example, when I saw a series of photographs by Stieglitz showing Georgia O’Keeffe’s delicate hands adorning smooth industrial products (they were always round), I was inspired to photograph the hands of a black worker washing the white sidewall off one of my father’s 1947 Hudson tires,” Mr. Kalisher wrote. “It was my first protest photo. »

Par Sam Roberts
Originally published in the New York Times, July 26, 2023

Simpson Kalisher : New York Street Photography
December 7, 2023 – February 2, 2024
Keith de Lellis Gallery
41 East 57th Street, Suite 703
New York, NY 10022
(212) 327-1482
www.keithdelellisgallery.com