Midtown Manhattan

Rebecca Lepkoff was a New York–born photographer who captured street life in her Lower East Side neighborhood. Lepkoff bought her first camera with earnings from dancing at the 1939 World’s Fair and then turned her eye to the rhythms and movements of daily life in the city. She associated with a number of other Jewish photographers of the period, including Arnold Eagle, who introduced her to the Photo League, a group that recorded the rapidly changing urban environment in which they lived. Her works document the bygone spaces, buildings, and communities of her youth and much of her adult life.