Interview: LES Photographer Rebecca Lepkoff
Photographer Rebecca Lepkoff, recalls a time when the streets of the Lower East Side were like a theater. “There was always something happening… life took place on the street,” she says.
Lepkoff, 95, grew up in a tenement at 60 Hester St., an address that no longer exists, and was always fascinated with the streets of her youth. Her black and white photographs depict scenes from a neighborhood that has all but vanished—girls skipping rope in the street; people gathered in front of the Loew’s Canal theater before a show; stoop-sitting and sharing gossip; women hanging laundry on clotheslines strung between buildings.
Lepkoff’s photographs have appeared in numerous galleries and museum shows as well as in A History of Women Photographers by Naomi Rosenblum; Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck; Street Gangs by Sandra Gardiner and Life on the Lower East Side: Photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff, 1937-1950 by Peter Dans and Suzanne Wasserman. Watch a slideshow we prepared, highlighting some of some of her work by clicking on this link (the photos are courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery).
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