Arlene Gottfried. Teatro Puerto Rico, c. 1980.
When Arlene Gottfried passed in 2017, the world took note as The New York Times ran one of her photographs on the front page of the Saturday edition and a full-page obituary inside. After a lifetime of picture making, it was a fitting tribute to the artist who had gone largely unheralded in her own lifetime.
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But Gottfired did not travail in obscurity. The author of five monographs, Gottfried’s spent her sunset years basking in the critical glow of two well-received exhibitions, Sometimes Overwhelming (2014) and Bacalaitos and Fireworks (2016), thanks to the work of New York gallerist Daniel Cooney.
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On September 13, Cooney will present Arlene Gottfried: After Dark, a selection of black and white photographs made on the streets, in the nightclubs, dive bars, back alleys, and drug dens of New York in the 1980s. Gottfried’s portraits reveal a profound sense of beauty made with exquisite sensitivity and care to the impact of poverty, addiction, and crime on people plagued by the effects of systemic oppression, generation after generation.
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Arlene Gottfried. Studio 54, 1979.
Arlene Gottfried. Empire Rollerdrome, c. 1980.