From the nineteen-seventies until her death last August, at the age of sixty-six, the photographer Arlene Gottfried combed New York City’s streets, parks, beaches, subways, and night clubs, in search of the shock of recognition one sometimes finds in perfect strangers. She understood the fractions of confidence and insecurity that make a public face. She liked sharp cheekbones and weird, pillowy proportions; she liked kids who comported themselves like adults, with laden, sphinx-like features. When Gottfried died, she left behind fifteen thousand pictures. (For her first posthumous exhibition, “A Lifetime of Wandering,” which is on view through the end of April, her gallerist, Daniel Cooney, has pored through her archive, selecting fifty photographs that capture her fantastic openness.)
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Gottfried came from a family of originals. Her younger brother is Gilbert Gottfried, the comedian and actor known for voicing Iago, the strident parrot in Disney’s “Aladdin,” and for making what’s widely acknowledged as the first 9/11 joke, at a Friars Club roast less than a month after the towers fell. Gottfried’s grating voice, to say nothing of his fondness for blowjob jokes, belies his kindness, and the depth of his family life. When his sister’s health began to fail—she died of complications from breast cancer—he visited her constantly, keeping her spirits up. “It’s a gift,” she said in “Gilbert,” a documentary about him that came out last year, “to turn life’s anxiety and doubt into something funny.” Arlene shared that gift, in her way.
“Most people remember me as very quiet growing up,” Gilbert told me recently. Arlene, by contrast, “was the most prone to lift up a rock and see what was crawling underneath it.” The Gottfrieds were born in Coney Island—five years apart, with their sister Karen between them—where their father ran a hardware store. The neighborhood, with its amusements and seedy sideshows, attracted New Yorkers from all walks of life. Arlene once likened it to a kind of exposure therapy: seeing so many weirdos meant that, for the rest of her life, she “never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture.” When the family moved to Crown Heights, she wandered there, too, entranced by the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican community. To abet her roaming, her father gave her an old camera. She carried it with her wherever she went.
Gottfried studied photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology (she was the only woman in her class), and soon found commercial work. But out in the world she gravitated, Gilbert said, toward “people and scenes that the average person would see and go, ‘Ooh, this looks creepy—let’s cross the street.’ ” Gottfried’s work has been compared to that of Diane Arbus, who also had an eye for freaks. But Gottfried was drawn more to the freak-adjacent: an ensemble cast of New York’s gentler eccentrics, its cool customers and would-be fashion plates, vulnerable and indomitable. Many of the people shown in “A Lifetime of Wandering” look as if they’ve grown so accustomed to screwing up their courage that they’ve found some peace in it; they just get out there and let it all hang out. A roller-skater with a cherubic face reposes on the pavement. In the men’s room at a disco, a fire-eater, wearing only briefs, practices his craft beside a row of urinals. A woman with a bandaged nose stands placidly against a chain-link fence. Susan Sontag once scorned street photographers for “cruising the urban inferno,” but in Gottfried’s photos that inferno feels more like a warm bath. There’s neighborliness in her approach, a tender curiosity. “It was a mixture of excitement, joy, and warmth,” she told the Times, in 2016. “There was this striking beauty the people had.”
As Arlene honed her craft, she helped Gilbert with his, too. Noticing that he enjoyed cracking jokes and imitating celebrities, she urged him to try an open-mic night she’d heard about in Manhattan. With Karen, the two of them “made the long journey from Brooklyn into Manhattan and found the place,” he told me. “They sat in the audience and I wrote my name down: ‘Gilbert, comedian.’ Mainly it was folk singers and stuff like that. I’m sure they were thinking, This could be a disaster.”
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t—years later, the two couldn’t even agree where they’d gone that night. What lingered, Gilbert said, was his sister’s encouragement. He cultivated a manic, madcap approach to standup that seemed to tickle her. One of his early bits was “Mickey Mouse on acid.” (You can watch a clip on YouTube, Gilbert flapping a pair of large red plates over his head, shrieking about a bad trip. He looks terrified, but also kind of elated—like someone his sister might want to photograph.) Later, at clubs in the city, Gilbert would make sure to put Arlene on the guest list. When Carolines moved to Times Square, he told me, “it would be a night out for her. Her health wasn’t that good by then. She’d come in and have something to eat and watch the show.” She might have been the only one in the crowd who’d heard his real speaking voice. In conversation, Gottfried is measured and calm, with no trace of his trademark squawk.
Though Gilbert has spent his career as a performer, and Arlene spent hers as an observer, they shared a fixation on the masks that people wear—to take the stage or just to get through life. When, a few years ago, their mother got sick, Arlene followed an urge to do away with those masks. In a photo essay called “Mommie,” she chronicled her mother’s decline, her stints in nursing homes and hospitals, in stark but compassionate detail. “I was afraid,” Arlene says in the documentary. “That’s how I knew how to cope with it, by taking pictures . . . that’s how I dealt with the pain.” As a comic, Gilbert had built his career on raw audacity, touching anything that said DO NOT TOUCH. (In 2011, after he joked on Twitter about the tsunami in Japan, Aflac fired him as the honking voice of their spokes-duck.) Arlene had found the one subject that was off-limits—the one that would always come too soon. “I would help my mother off the bus, because she was very weak,” Gilbert told me. “And my sister was taking pictures. I was horrified by the idea of the photos, and confused. But I also understood that it had to be done . . . She had to take those pictures.”
Not long after “Mommie” was published, Arlene’s own health began to falter. “I have stage-four breast cancer,” she says in the documentary. “And I’m very frightened.” Her dread is plain in one scene, when Gilbert accompanies her to the clinic, sitting at her side as doctors insert a tube in her chest. “If I were here alone today, I’d be in a terrible mood,” she says. “He makes me laugh.” Gilbert scrunches his face up and flops his tongue out of the side of his mouth, and Arlene cracks up.
Looking at her photos seems to activate a sense of loss in Gilbert. “I’ll see one and I’ll think, Oh, gee, I was standing next to her when she took that,” he said. Her work summons a family that’s fading into the past and, with it, a city that’s been priced out of its own identity. (When I told Gilbert that I lived in his old neighborhood of Crown Heights, where I was among the demographic he’d once inveighed against in a Wall Street Journal editorial called “Brooklyn Before the Hipsters,” he forgave me, with a caveat: “Just . . . go on drugs, at least.”) With photography, Arlene was, as she put it, “able to go to places other people would only see in pictures.” Back in the nineties, when she photographed the Eternal Light Community Singers, a gospel choir in Harlem, she ended up joining the group. Gilbert told me, “I remember one of the guys from the choir, at her funeral, was talking about how different she was, how unique. And he goes, ‘How else do you explain how a Jewish girl from Brooklyn rose up to be a Pentecostal gospel singer?’ ”
