Subject Guide: Photography

Kurt and Grete Goldsmith Family Collection (AR 25681)

The collection contains materials that pertain to the life and work of Kurt and Grete Goldsmith. After immigrating to the US from Germany during WW2, Kurt opened a opened a successful photography studio in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The collection contains personal documents detailing the family's life before, during, and after the war but also numerous portraits taken by Kurt in his photography studio, found in Series I, subseries 3.

Eva Lowenherz Collection (AR 25759) [Collection is digitized and available online.]

Eva Cohnreich was born December 27, 1914 in Berlin, Germany. After graduating from high school Eva started improving her photography skills in Berlin, later traveling to England and Romania to pursue related art processes and to continue her photography. She arrived in New York in the late 1930s, where she found a position working in the darkroom at Time, Inc. By 1937 Eva had begun to take her own “picture stories”, working with the Three Lions picture agency. 

Omar Oscar Marcus Collection (AR 5650) [Collection is digitized and available online.]

Oscar Marcus was born in Berlin on August 12, 1910 and graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts. At 20 he began a career as a photographer, eventually finding fame for his photojournalism in various Arab countries, leading to him adopting the name "Omar." After WW2 he worked for the Associated Press London and published his work in a variety of newspapers and magazines. His career later took Mexico, where he taught cinematography at the University of Mexico City. 

Metz-Green-Stone Family Papers (P-587)

William Metz emigrated from Russia to New York in the early 1900s. William was a professional photographer and owned Metz Studios, located on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn. He photographed all of the U.S. presidents from William Howard Taft to Harry S. Truman. The larger portion of this collection concerns the family members living in Queens, NY. William took the the majority of the family photographs in this collection that were taken between 1910 to the 1950s.

Kurt Safranski Collection (AR 25957) 

This collection documents the personal life and professional career of art director, editor, and photographer Kurt Safranski, who co-founded the photo agency Black Star in 1935, which became highly successful selling photographs to leading American magazines. The collection also includes information about the career and life of Kurt’s daughter, Tina Fredericks-Koch, who worked as an art director for magazines and in real estate. 

John (Hans) and Trude Schiff Collection (AR 25082) [Collection is digitized and available online.]
Addenda to the John (Hans) and Trude Schiff Collection (AR 25730) [Collection is digitized and available online.]

The main collection (AR 25082) documents the life of John Schiff, a professional photographer, and his wife Trude, a physician. John began his career in Cologne, working for his father's company which produced printed advertisements. In 1933 he started learning about photography. After coming to the United States in 1940, he started working as a freelance commercial photographer and worked on location for art dealers and artists. The bulk of the collection focuses on John's career in photography and contains photographs and negatives, as well as photo albums.  

The secondary collection (AR 25730) predominantly consists of photographic prints and negatives taken by John D. or Trude Schiff of various artists.

Displaced Persons Camps and Centers Photograph Collection (RG 249.5)

The collection is comprised of photographs of various provenances related to the lives of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in the period immediately following the Second World War, from 1945 to 1952. The photographs pertain to DP camps and communities in the Allied occupation zones in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily those established by the American and British military, and administered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and later the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Approximately 60% of the collection pertains to Germany; 25% to Austria; and 15% to Italy.

Godfrey Frankel Collection (RG 1238)

Godfrey Frankel was a photographer whose work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of the City of New York. His photographs have been reproduced in Life, The New York Times, Ladies Home Journal, and other publications. Contained in this collection are 14 photographs of Manhattan, 1946-1947, part of Frankel's New York series. 

Bernard Gotfryd Papers (RG 1380)

Gotfryd was trained as a combat photographer in the United States Army Signal Corps. Following his service he became a photographer for Newsweek and gained fame for his photos of celebrities, politicians, artists, and writers. This collection includes photos of Woody Allen, Allan Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Simone Weil, and many others. Also found in this collection are slides of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, slides of the gathering of Holocaust survivors in Washington in 1983, photographs of Godfryd and of his family, and stills from Jack Eisner's film Children of the Holocaust.  

Selection of Photos from the Graduate School for Jewish Social Work (New York, N.Y.) Records (I-7) [Selection is digitized and available online.]

This selection is part of the larger East Side Project, enacted by the GSJSW during the 1932-1933 academic year. This photographic study comprises photographs documenting buildings, businesses, organizations and people on the Lower East Side of New York from 1932-1934. Most of the photographs were taken in 1933. The finding aid for the main collection can be found here. 

Alter Kacyzne (RG 1270)

The collection consists of Kacyzne's photographic works of Jewish life in Poland taken in 70 communities. Photos in this collection include photos of depicting the daily life of Jews, Jewish immigrants at the HIAS office in Warsaw, and theater photographs, notably of the Vilna Troupe. .

Evgenii Lendon Collection (RG 1853)

The collection is comprised of 147 sepia and black and white photo prints, some of which were made from glass negatives. The glass negatives are not in this collection. Most of the photos show L’viv during the last decades under the Hapsburg rule and the interwar period in the independent Polish republic. Included are views of major thoroughfares, street and marketplace scenes, advertisements, parades, theaters, high society clubs, ceremonies, churches, monuments, and cemeteries. A select number of photographs clearly depict Jewish life: Jewish shops, a hospital, a cemetery and funeral chapel, burnt-out synagogues, and old Jewish neighborhoods. Jewish signs and posters in Yiddish and Polish are visible in some photos.

Ira Nowinski Collection (RG 1181)

Ira Nowinski formerly served as the official photographer of the San Francisco Opera. His work has been exhibited at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and at Stanford University Libraries' Peterson Gallery. This collection consists of 95 black-and-white photographs of Soviet Jews in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as photographs of Holocaust monuments around the world.

Zeva Oelbaum Photographs (ASF AR 76) [Collection is digitized and available online.]

This collection contains photographs taken by photographer Zeva Oelbaum in 1976 in Afghanistan (Herat and Kabul), Egypt (Alexandria and Cairo), Iran (Tehran and Isfahan), and Morocco. Included are 72 unique photographs and 42 contact sheets. Oelbaum's notes can be found on many of the contact sheets and some of the versos. Since many of the versos were digitized, the collection as a whole measures 205 digital images.

Roman Vishniac Collection (RG 1223)

In the 1930s Roman Vishniac travelled throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, photographing Jewish communities, landmarks, types, and lifestyles. These photographs were later the subject of several exhibits in the U.S. including two exhibits at YIVO in 1943 and 1944, and of a number of photographic albums published in the U.S. and abroad.

Selection of Photos of Turkish Synagogues from the Joel A. Zack Papers (ASF AR 78) [Selection is digitized and available online.]

The Joel A. Zack papers consist of research notes, correspondence, oversized architectural site drawings, slides, and photographs of various synagogues, mellahs, and Jewish cemeteries in various areas of Morocco and Turkey. The images in this subseries concern Zack's documentation of Turkish Synagogues, working with photographer Devon Jarvis. The digitized images reflect a portion of the slides and photographic prints that can be found in Series II of the main collection. The finding aid for the main collection can be found here. 

World Monument's Fund Photographic Archive of the Synagogues of Morocco from the Joel A. Zack Papers (ASF AR 78) [Selection is digitized and available online.]

The World Monuments Fund is a private nonprofit organization founded in 1965 that works with local partners around the globe to provide funding and resources for preservation, conservation, and documentation of historical sites in danger of destruction. The negatives and photographic positives in this series represent Zack's contribution, in conjunction with photographer Isaiah Wyner, to the World Monuments Fund Photographic Archive of the Synagogues of Morocco survey. The finding aid for the main collection can be found here.