REBECCA LEPKOFF, Under the 3rd Avenue "L" at Oak Street, New York. Photo League Exhibition Print., 1947, 12.25x10.625" Gelatin silver print, Printed c. 1947, Signed in pencil on mount recto under right of print. Inscribed in pencil under left of print: Under the 3rd Ave L at Oak St. Inscribed in pencil on mount verso: Vintage Print - new matte [sic] / Under the 3rd Ave L 1947 / Exhibited at Photo League / Rebecca Lepkoff / 3rd Ave + Oak St. N.Y.C.

Rebecca Lepkoff studied dance as a young artist, before studying photography at the age of 24 with Arnold Eagle. The two photographers were friends, teachers, colleagues, and mentors.

Rebecca Lepkoff (1916-2014) grew up in a tenement on Hester Street in New York City. Her father was a tailor and the family bounced around various Lower East Side addresses as they struggled to improve their circumstances. She bought her first camera in 1938 and started photographing her native city. She married in 1941, settling in a nearby tenement on Cherry Street, where she had three children and focused her lens on the world she inhabited.

Lepkoff developed her eye under the tutelage of Arnold Eagle, the first of many idealistic Jewish photographers - including Sid Grossman, Paul Strand, and Walter Rosenblum - who introduced her to the Photo League and encouraged her to continue to document the city. Like so many left-leaning New York photographers who came of age during the Great Depression - many of them recent Jewish immigrants or first-generation Americans - Lepkoff soon found her classroom and home at the famed Photo League, where she encountered a large group of like-minded members who believed in the power of the documentary photograph.

Her work has been featured in numerous books, galleries, and museum exhibits, including A History of Women Photographers  by Naomi Rosenblum; Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck; and The Radical Camera, New York's Photo League (1936-1951). In 2006, a monograph of her work, Life on the Lower East Side: Photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff (1937-1950), was published that includes essays by Peter E. Dans and Suzanne Wasserman.

Lepkoff's work is included in the collections of the National Museum of Art (Washington D.C.) the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of the City of New York.

CREDIT: Howard Greenberg Gallery
http://www.howardgreenberg.com/artists/rebecca-lepkoff

Good. Some edge wear on print and mount, few scratches on surface of print, bubble in print where separating from mount.