Unboxing thousands of photos of New York City in the 70s and 80s

An inconspicuous locker in a lower Manhattan storage center is a gateway to a New York city still plagued by crack, AIDS and rampant crime.

A drug user hunkers down for a fix in a seedy Manhattan heroin den. A man wearing a Savage Riders motorcycle gang jacket holds a yawning baby. A child sits astride a stripped bicycle on a trash-strewn street in Spanish Harlem.

Not everything is gloomy. There's a pig roasting on a spit in an abandoned lot in Brooklyn. A smiling, bikini-clad bodybuilder flexes next to a Hasidic rabbi on a beach in Queens.

These and countless other images are crammed into hundreds of boxes left behind by acclaimed street photographer Arlene Gottfried, who turned her fearless lens to New York's lesser-known neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although the archive was prized in photography circles for both its artistic integrity and documentation of underrepresented neighborhoods, it had remained in limbo and disarray since Ms. Gottfried's death in 2017 at age 66 due to complications from breast cancer.

But now it looks like it's being saved.

Mrs. Gottfried left the archive to her brother, the comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried, and to their sister, Karen Gottfried, a retired teacher. Before she died, the photographer asked her brother and his wife, Dara Gottfried, to preserve her work to safeguard her legacy.

But Mr. Gottfried, who relied on his wife to pack his bags when he traveled to performances, had no intention of sorting through his sister's tens of thousands of images on slides, negatives and prints.

Then, not long after Arlene's death, he became ill himself and died in 2022 at the age of 67.

Last year, Dara Gottfried said, she finally began digitizing and organizing the photo collection, with the help of Eryn DuChene, a young photographer.

When the work is completed, she says, she will determine whether it goes to a museum or to a buyer who wants to keep the work accessible to the public.

“Arlene wanted her legacy to be kept alive in museums, shows or galleries,” Dara Gottfried said during a recent visit to the vault. “Gilbert and I wanted to honor her wish to share her work with the world so it could live on forever.”

Mr. DuChene digitally scanned photos of the boxes stacked on cabinets and shelves in a bathroom-sized storage area.

He pulled out crates of old film cameras — Ms. Gottfried never converted to digital photography — and yellow Kodak boxes filled with bathroom portraits of disco-era clubgoers. In another box, tattooed lovers embrace on the street. No chain store or mobile phone can be seen in the images.

Over the years, her production gathered in her studio apartment in the Westbeth houses, the subsidized artists' colony in the West Village that once housed the photographer Diane Arbus, to whom Ms. Gottfried has been compared.

“It was like an elephant in the room in her apartment,” said Daniel Cooney, Ms. Gottfried's gallerist. “She didn't want to have to deal with it. She didn't know where to start.”

Sean Corcoran, senior curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, called Ms. Gottfried's archive “a unique and important collection, with both artistic value and historical and social relevance to a moment in time in New York City . “

“What's at stake,” he said, “is choosing the right place to take it, because the material could either linger in obscurity or, given the right place, be recognized as the important body of work that it really is.'

While the Gottfried Archive wouldn't necessarily command a price like those of Robert Mapplethorpe or James Van Der Zee, two other New York photographers whose archives raised significant sums, it could attract offers from top institutions, he added.

When Ms. Gottfried was growing up in Brooklyn, her father gave her an old camera, with which she began photographing candid street scenes and portraits of strangers.

“We lived on Coney Island, and that was always meeting all kinds of people, so I never had a problem walking up to people and asking them to take their picture,” she says. told The Guardian in 2014.

When the family moved to Crown Heights, a teenage Arlene began shooting her neighbors, then went on to document daily life and local characters in similar neighborhoods on Manhattan's Lower East Side and in Spanish Harlem.

“It was a mixture of excitement, devastation and drug use,” she says told The New York Times in 2016. “But there was more than just that. It was the people, the humanity of the situation. You had very good people there trying to make it.

She studied photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and did commercial photography for an advertising agency in the mid-1970s. Subsequently, her work was published as a freelancer in The Times, The Village Voice and Fortune and Life magazines.

Over the years, the city became safer, more gentrified and, for Ms. Gottfried, less visually interesting.

“Arlene loved old New York before it became posh and rich,” said Karen Gottfried, her sister. “There were a lot more eccentric people to be honest, everyone dressed with individuality and they all liked that. She didn't like luxury. She liked the funky stuff.”

Mrs. Gottfried's work began to arouse greater interest later in her life. Her work has been featured in books and gallery exhibitions, including a particularly successful exhibition in 2014 Mr. Cooney's gallery in Chelsea.

“She was shocked and grateful that people were buying her work,” Mr Cooney said. Her prints fetched $5,000 each, an impressive sum for street photography, he said.

Mr Cooney hosted another Arlene Gottfried show in 2016 and then three more after her death. Dara Gottfried said a curator has selected prints from the vault for an exhibition in Germany in March. A photography center in France also selects photos for a solo exhibition.

“She didn't get nearly enough attention in her lifetime,” Mr Cooney said.

Mr. Gottfried liked and encouraged his sister's photography work. She was featured in “Gilbert,” a 2017 documentary about him.

“How her eyes catch people and how she touches them is hard to explain,” he told The Guardian in 2014.

Mrs. Gottfried also encouraged her brother's artistic interests, both as an artist talented sketcher and executor. Mr. Gottfried, five years her junior, entertained the family with jokes and imitations. His interest in stand-up comedy blossomed in his teens after his sisters took him to an open-mic night in Greenwich Village.

“They had mutual respect for each other – they supported each other,” said his wife Dara Gottfried. “I think there are a lot of parallels between them, the way they grew up and looked at the world. Both were true artists and cared about the art and not the glitz and glamor of show business.”

Adam Reid, a writer and director who was friends with Mr. Gottfried, said the siblings' similar artistic expression was largely formed during their austere childhoods.

“They dealt with the trauma of growing up in poverty during some of the city's darkest eras and both found a way to find light in the darkness and channel their pain into bold, creative expression,” he said.

As adults, Arlene Gottfried continued to live near her brother in Manhattan and met him regularly for breakfast. Mr. Gottfried's fame led to a running joke among her friends.

“Instead of saying, 'How are you?' they said, 'How's your brother?'” Karen Gottfried recalled. “She loved that.”

When Arlene began to suffer from cancer, Mr. Gottfried guided her through her treatment and kept her on track with his humor.

She never married or had children and remained focused on her photography, Karen Gottfried said.

“It wasn't lucrative, but she did it out of love,” she said. “She sacrificed a lot for her art. She stuck with it and didn't sell out.”