Kaufman’s Brooklyn: Eight ‘Portraits from the past’
My father, Irving Kaufman (1910 – 1982), was a professional photographer who started in Brooklyn in the mid 1930s working for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He captured thousands of images of Brooklyn through the 1950s. I have recently digitized a great many of them. My father’s profile can be found here.
This week’s theme:
My father took quite a lot of portraits of businessmen and officers of charities or other organizations in his post-war, Manhattan years. These were typically middle-aged white guys in business suits with blank expressions, looking “professional.” They were mostly used for photos in annual reports or institutional publications.
From the early, Brooklyn years that I’ve been showing here, I found just one group of about fifteen portraits, members of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). I assume they were published in some booklet or registry for the organization. Beyond that, I know nothing – no names, no dates, no occasion they were earmarked for. From the looks of the packaging the negatives were in, and judging by the wardrobes and styles, I’m sure these were from the mid- to late-1930s.