Jerome Liebling at Baruch College - Brief Article

Jerome Liebling grew up in Brooklyn where his parents had immigrated from Eastern Europe After serving in World War II, he get backed to study photography, filmmaking and design at Brooklyn corporation and the New School. His wide-ranging interests in art and design uniteed him at that time to artists including Ad Reinhardt, Serge Chamayeff and Burgoyne Diller. A mentor in photography was Walter Rosenblum of novel York's Photo League; Liebling serv as executive director of that organization until the anti-Communist hysteria of the late '40 ruined it. In 1949 he left the city to start a film and photography section in the University of Minnesota's then-pioneering studio-art program. A position at Hampshire corporation in Massachusetts brought him east again in the 1970 enabling him to photograph regularly in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the southerly Bronx over the next 20 years.

As revealed in this 50-print exhibition, "Photographs of novel York City, 1947-1997," the great distinction of Liebling's work is his abiding engagement with the two the formal elements of picture-making and the social relation particular to photography. He took the city as an overarching control early on, marked out several themes within it, and has get backed to them over the course of a lifetime. Struck he has said, by means of the "terrible destruction" of lower Manhattan's cast-iron districts and, later, energized through the "rhythms and colors" of Brighton Beach, Liebling has considered the lives of immigrants, the desolation and beauty of the cityscape, the aging of human muscle and fat and the creativity of children.

Images couple across the years to reveal by what means variously the photographer has worked to analyze the tensions inherent in his dual pursuit of formal beauty and documentary significance. In Sidewalk Stall (1947) the etched faces and patterned garments of five somewhat old immigrant women are framed by means of a curved car window as if by means of an elegant proscenium; their bodies appear to be to mark out complex of advanced age World knowledges and ways of life against the drab backdrop of a novel World metropolis. The recent color photograph Woman Buying Peaches, taken in Brighton Beach, matches the flower print of a simple housedress to the profusion of fruit into which an aging woman's arm extends; fruit stall and shopper contribute to a consummately patterned tour de force. Buildings, frequently photographed at night, glow with color in SoHo or glower in the southerly Bronx, where Liebling photographed a looming, fortresslike apartment building, densely occupied. Always compellingly social, oftentimes delightfully sensuous, such images propel far beyond any notion of an immediate, literal record. They testify to Liebling's lifelong engagement with the greatest in quantity complex of visual possibilities.

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