Thursday, May 13, 2010

Rebecca Lepkoff: Life On The Lower East Side, Part 4


An excerpt of Rebecca's portion of a book talk at the Tenement Museum on May 13, 2010
The Lower East Side became by the 1930s a vibrant multiethnic community full of families and friends. The residents congregated on stoops, street corners, sidewalks, fire escapes, and rooftops of the neighborhood tenements and shared the unique languages, food, and festivals of their various cultures.
Rebecca Lepkoff, herself a child of immigrant parents, grew up in this community. The faces of the Lower East Side became her muse and through the lens of her camera she captured the lives of a spirited neighborhood - women hanging laundry out their windows, children playing stickball in the street, men chatting at the barbershop. This book, the first monograph of Lepkoff's work, highlights the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges from the Bowery to the East River.
Over 170 reproduced photographs and essays by Peter E. Dans and Suzanne Wasserman uncover a forgotten time and place and reveal how the Lower East Side remains both unaltered and forever changed.

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