Sy Kattelson

Sy Kattelson (born Seymour Kattelson, February 11, 1923, New York, New York) is an American photographer whose earliest work documents working class New Yorkers during the years immediately following World War Two. He was an early practitioner of street photography and was associated with the Photo League from 1947 until its closing in 1951. His portraits, frequently taken without his subjects' awareness while traveling through the streets or riding the city's subways, convey the dignity of their lives as lived in public places. The depth of his photographs often comes from the tension between the grittiness of their urban settings and the contemplative sense of his subjects' as being lost within themselves.

Kattelson was born in 1923 in the Bronx to a middle class Jewish family. His mother owned a lingerie shop and his father was an electrician and fabricator of neon signs. His paternal grandfather was a vaudeville musician whose lifestyle influenced Kattelson's decision to become an artist. Until he was 7 years old they lived on Mount Eden area of the Grand Concourse and then moved to a house in Laurelton, Queens. In 1936 they lost the family store and returned to the Bronx, eventually settling in what was then the working-class neighborhood of Manhattan's Washington Heights. He attended Stuyvesant High School, intending on becoming an aeronautical engineer, but abandoned this direction on learning that there were few jobs being given to Jews at the time in engineering.

It was while working as a delivery boy for the Aremac Camera store on 43rd street that he first became aware of the possibility of working professionally as a photographer. A German refugee couple who were the owners of a studio to which he was making a delivery on sensing his interest in their work encouraged him to pursue photography. He later worked in the dark room at Stone-Wright Studio and then became the assistant to one of their in-house photographers. This was followed by his becoming the photographer at Lawrence Studios- where he photographed scenes staged by illustrators who would then use his work as the basis for their illustrations in magazines such as 'True Story', 'Cosmopolitan' and 'Romance'.

Rather than wait to be drafted, in 1942 he volunteered for the Air Corps as a corporal aerial cartographer, developing film taken from aircraft to assess the success of their bombing runs. At the war's end he was redeployed to France where he worked as an army publicity photographer.

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