By Scott Brinton
Throughout Arthur Leipzig's life, slashing his right arm while working at his uncle's Houston glass factory ranks among the most fortunate events to befall this great photojournalist.
The year was 1941. Leipzig, who was 23, had traveled around the country before that, jumping from job to job. He lacked direction. He craved a profession, a purpose, however. "As a kid, I always wondered what I'd be," Leipzig said recently at his Sea Cliff home.
Upon destroying his arm, Leipzig, now 82, returned to his native Brooklyn to live with family and recover. He survived on $14.40 monthly disability insurance. He had heard about the Photo League of New York, an organization that brought the country's best photographers together to teach their trade. He thought to take a course in hopes of becoming a photo-lab technician. He had no desire to return to factory life. He also had no idea where the Photo League would take him.
"Two weeks into the class, I knew with absolute certainty I was going to be a photographer," Leipzig said.
Starting Jan. 22, a retrospective of Leipzig's work will go on display at Nassau Community College's Firehouse Gallery. The exhibition, appropriately titled "A Tribute to Influence," also will feature the works of many of Leipzig's students.
Among his pupils in the show is Susan Kravitz, now chairwoman of Nassau Community's Art Department. "Arthur's way of seeing, not just as expressed in his exceptional photographs, but even more in his view of the world, has profoundly influenced my own photographic vision," Kravitz said.
In 1942, fresh from the Photo League, Leipzig set out to make a name in the highly competitive photographic world. He worked for PM Magazine as a staff photographer for four years, then as a free-lancer for The New York Times, Fortune, Natural History and Look, among other publications. Over the years, he also shot advertising photography for Fortune 500 companies, such as IBM. Today, his eloquent black-and-white images are preserved in the permanent collections of the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
He is best known for his photo books, however. Among them is "Sarah's Daughters," an intimate look at Jewish women around the world published during the 1980's by the women's Organization for Rehabilitation and Training. For this project, Leipzig photographed Jewish people, women in particular, from Tunisia to Ethiopia, Iran, Hungary, Chile, among nine other countries.
Leipzig, a former Levittown and East Meadow resident, sought to show the spectrum of Jewish life worldwide. "I thought to myself, I was brought up in this middle-class Jewish life ... I wanted to show who the Jewish people were. They were not just bankers," he said.
Leipzig, who is Jewish, began his odyssey in 1979, and throughout the 1980's, he traveled to places he never imagined. In Djerba, an island off Tunisia, he said, "I found a Jewish community so old that it dated to the destruction of the Second Temple (more than 1900 years ago)."
Leipzig has also earned high praise for his 1995 "Growing Up in New York," which documents his many assignments on the streets of New York City, along with published personal projects capturing children at play and commuters riding the subways.
Several images from Leipzig's books will appear in the Nassau Community show. The photographs speak passionately about the human condition. They reveal life in the raw, never holding back, always offering truth. Leipzig has rarely shot a posed portrait. That is not his style. Rather, he waits and watches his subjects, seeking what Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the 20th century's great photojournalists and an influence on Leipzig, called the critical moment.
Leipzig crafts intuitive pictures. "It is not my way to work intellectually," he said. "I respond with my gut, and I try to understand it intellectually later."
That is the message he sent his students while a professor at Long Island University from 1963 to '91. Leipzig approached academia as he did photography -- emotionally. "I never taught like an academic. We learned by doing," he said.
For one course, he required students to complete a non-stop, 24-hour treasure hunt, seeking assigned photographs, returning to the lab, developing them and critiquing them. His pupils loved the exercise, and they loved Leipzig. They even named an intramural softball team at C.W. Post after him -- Arthur's Apertures (aperture being the lens hole that allows light into a camera).
LuAnn Palazzo, a former student of Leipzig's, said, "When he was my professor at C.W. Post, Arthur made me see through the lens in a way I've come to call simple sight. He taught me to fill the frame with a pure image, and that purity of image is often the most powerful statement a photographer can make."
Indeed, that Arthur Leipzig injured his arm at a Texas glass factory was a fortunate event -- both for him and the craft of photography that he loves so dearly.
Arthur Leipzig: A Tribute to Influence
Where: Nassau Community College's Firehouse Gallery, Garden City.
When: Saturday, Jan. 27 through Tuesday, Feb. 27. Gallery hours: Monday and Tuesday, 10 a.m..-4 p.m.; Wednesday and Thursday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.
