Simpson Kalisher (1926-2023) | MONOVISIONS - Black & White Photography Magazine

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Simpson Kalisher, who liberated his lens from slick images in corporate reports and trade magazines to emerge as a discerning photojournalist whose street scenes froze the panorama of urban American life in the 1950s and ’60s, died on June 13 in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 96.

A Bronx native, Mr. Kalisher “was one of the last survivors of that generation of dynamic New York street photographers born in the 1920s and employed at first by the magazines, a group that included Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand,” Lucy Sante, who wrote the foreword to Mr. Kalisher’s book “The Alienated Photographer” (2011), said in an email. “His most distinguishing feature was his social empathy and imagination.”

The foreword described Mr. Kalisher as “our Virgil through this rapidly receding time, giving the impression in every frame of remembering a stricter but richer past while also perceiving the outline and maybe even the details of the anarchic future” through photographs that “seem to represent the culmination of a thousand thoughts that were in the air.”

Describing a showing of Mr. Kalisher’s work at the Keith de Lellis gallery in Manhattan in 2011, The New Yorker wrote that it was grounded in “atmospheric urban noir.”

“Kalisher worked primarily on the street,” the magazine said, “yielding photographs that are anecdotal and full of characters: a pugnacious child outside church, a driver sticking his tongue out, a fed-up guy pushing his stalled car.”

His photographs were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s historic “Family of Man” exhibition in 1955 and its 1978 show “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960.”

Simpson Kalisher (1926-2023)
7 December 2023 – 2 February 2024

Keith de Lellis Gallery
41 East 57th Street, Suite 703
New York, NY 10022
https://www.keithdelellisgallery.com