Sid Grossman

Sid Grossman was born in New York in 1913. In 1938, Grossman and his friend Sol Libsohn co-founded the New York Photo League, a left-leaning, socially conscious photographers’ cooperative and school. Grossman’s early photography was very much in the social documentary tradition, while his work began to evolve into a more personal and dynamic style during World War II. These changes came to fruition in his best-known photographs made in the late 1940s — images of New York’s Little Italy and Coney Island. Photographing at a very close distance and using blur and off-kilter compositions, his images are a precursor to the work of many better-known street photographers of the 1950s and ’60s. Grossman died of a heart attack in 1955.