Len with his vintage and fine-art photographs
on shelves in his Riverside Drive apartment

One of Len’s most memorable experiences as a photographer concerned a photograph of his that has become sufficiently famous to be called iconic. One morning, just after he had gotten up (and was still in his jockey shorts), Len looked out the window of the living room of his apartment on Riverside Drive, in upper Manhattan, and grabbed his camera. It was snowing heavily, and he saw a hooded figure in black walking in the park across the street. No sooner had Len snapped the picture than the figure was gone.

A 20" x 30" exhibition print of the picture, which Len titled, “Hooded Figure in Snow,” was shown and sold at the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton, Massachusetts. Subsequently, Len got an inquiry from Macmillan Publishing of Australia about the use of the picture for a book cover. The book, The Book Thief, by the Australian author Markus Zusak, was published in Australia in 2005 and Len’s black-and-white picture was indeed on the jacket cover, with a few bright red splashes of blood added.

The author’s wife bought another 20” x 30” exhibition print of “Hooded Figure,” and a phone call for the picture came from ABC Audio of Sydney for the cover of a CD of the book. (The novel is a book about the Holocaust told from the viewpoint of a young girl, and it made The New York Times bestseller list.) When he got these inquiries, Len was home from rehab after he had suffered a stroke, and it was, he said, “great therapy.”

Len holding Australian copy of The Book Thief
with his photo, "Hooded Figure," on the cover

“Hooded Figure” is also on the jacket cover of the French edition of The Book Thief and it is included in Black and White Photography: Manifest Visions/An International Collection, by James Luciana (Rockport Press, 2000).

Another photograph of Len's, of a football scene in Central Park taken in 1979, is included in Central Park, by Edward J. Levine (Arcadia Publishing Company, 2006). Several of his pictures are collected in Cityscapes - a History of New York in Images, edited by Howard B. Rock and Deborah Dash Moore (Columbia University Press, 2001), and his work is featured as a full-page frontispiece and full interior page in City Play, by Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin (Rutgers University Press, 1990).

The camera Len had grabbed to take "Hooded Figure" was his “trusty old, reliable” Nikon Model F-1 35mm. camera with a 35mm. semi-wide-angle lens. He almost always used Kodak Tri-X black-and-white film rated at the normal speed of 400 ASA. To the best of his recollection, he shot the picture with an aperture setting of 5.6 and a speed setting of 1/125 seconds.

Len is also a collector of vintage fine art photographs, and has sold some in recent years. The first thing that catches your eye, however, when you come into his apartment is an enormous blow-up of a picture of a beautiful young lady. The lady is Len’s “special person,” and the picture was taken, and the blow-up produced, over 40 years ago. If you gaze admiringly at the huge picture, Len is apt to launch enthusiastically into an explanation of how he and his long-time friend, the artist Jonah Kinigstein, managed to produce the blow-up despite the limited technology available at the time.

Len and his friend tacked up high on the wall a large portion of a roll of photo-sensitive enlarging paper. Then they projected a slide of the image, in an ordinary slide projector, onto the paper. This had to be done in relative darkness, making, in Len’s words, “for an exciting experiment.” They made the best use they could of a photo meter, but the calculation of the necessary exposure was hit and miss.

The next step was to climb onto chairs to remove the large piece of paper from the wall so that they could dip the roll of paper, see-saw fashion, in troughs holding chemicals. (Most of the credit for the success of the project, Len insists, must go to his friend for constructing the shallow troughs to hold the chemicals.)

The huge blow-up Len produced long ago with
limited technology and a friend's crucial help

First they dipped the paper in special paper developer for over four minutes. Then they drained the developed print and immersed the paper in the trough filled with gallons of fixer in order to fix, or make permanent, the image produced by the developer. They did not have the resources for the additional solutions needed for “clearing” the fixer and for a prolonged washing of the finished print. As a result, it is a “miracle,” Len says, that the blow-up of the picture still exists, a little yellow, but mellow.

Len (Leonard) was born in the West Bronx, in New York City, in October, 1927, attended DeWitt Clinton High School, and began studying liberal arts at the City University of New York (“CUNY”). He was drafted at the end of World War II, and served two years in the Army, one of them in the Judge Advocate General’s Office of the First Cavalry in occupied Japan. He was assigned to the staff of that Office, which provides legal services, because, he says, “I was the only enlisted man who'd been to college and could type.”

After his discharge from the Army, Len went back to CUNY because his “hero,” Felix Cohen, was going to teach there for a semester. Felix Cohen was a distinguished lawyer and scholar who was Director of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, and he fundamentally shaped federal Indian law and policy to strengthen tribal governments and reduce federal domination of Indian tribes.

After graduation from CUNY, Len went to New York University’s School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review, and received his law degree in 1952. He worked for some years for various law firms doing corporate law, which he disliked, until setting up in practice with an NYU classmate in the late sixties. After five years, his law partner went into business, and Len continued as a solo practitioner until the 1990’s.

Len first got interested in photography when he was 13. His uncle bought him a development kit for his birthday, and Len used a plastic camera and developed his own film for years. Today, he emphasizes the importance of darkroom skills for a fine art photographer, but he recognizes the inevitability of digital photography and the amazing assistance that computer programs can bring to the photographic arts.

One of many photos taken by Len in Italy - this
is of two elderly women conversing, in Venice

During this time, a senior partner in Len’s law firm advised him to enter a Bar Association photography show, and invited him to use a darkroom in his house in Larchmont, New York. Len won two awards in the show, and drove two or three nights a week to Larchmont to make prints.

In selecting his subjects, he was inspired by the renowned French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and would “shoot” people on the street. He started by using a 35 mm. lens and then moved up to a 28 mm. lens so that he could get closer to his subject. He usuaIly didn't ask his subject if it was O.K. to take the picture, unless he thought it might be dangerous otherwise. He went into Central Park in the dark on one occasion, and three guys followed him. He ran. He had been a track star in school.

"Red Sky," selected for the Salamagundi Club
non-member photo and graphics show in 2008

Len became a photography stringer for ABC Eyewitness News (he has had a clutch of other corporate clients, including New York Magazine), and from the seventies through the nineties he provided photographs for many publishers of college textbooks. His most exciting and profitable assignment of this sort was from Random House for an Italian language text called Prago. His work involved taking black-and-white and color photographs in Italy for two weeks. A photo trip to Surinam (Dutch Guinea) was also memorable.

A good part of the late seventies and eighties was spent by Len club- and bar-crawling, photographing “all the mad dancers.” Studio 54, the Copacabana, the Mudd Club and a dozen others, says Len, “came under the purview of my camera in the wee, wee hours.” Len used a flash for these shots, mostly an off-camera one that connected to the camera with a remote cord. It was "light years away" from studio lighting. He has hundreds of rolls from this activity, and would like to see the photographs in a book.

Len with two photos shown at the May
2008 Lower East Side Arts Festival

His photos have been exhibited in group shows virtually every year since 1998. One of his photos was selected for the 2008 International Exhibition of Fine Art Photography (a competition), on display at the Center for Fine Arts Photography, in Fort Collins, Colorado from October 3 to November 1. His photograph "Red Sky" was chosen for the 2008 non-member photography and graphics show (a "juried," or selective, show) of the Salamagundi Club. The Club is a venerable New York City institution for artists, architects and the like, founded in Greenwich Village in 1871.

In addition, his photo, “D Train,” was one of 102 images selected out of more than 12,000 entries from 46 countries for the Art of Photography Show in Diego, California, and two of his pictures were exhibited in the Lower East Side Festival of the Arts gallery show in May.

Among the events of his career of which Len is particularly proud is his participation with a group of 40 photographers calling themselves “Document Brooklyn” to document Brooklyn. The group photographed all aspects of life in the borough around the clock for a full week, and the photographs have been shown in various Brooklyn institutions and featured in magazine spreads.

Len is also pleased to recall a ten-year stint (1990-1999) as a volunteer teacher of high school children of color under the ACT-SO Cultural Program of the NAACP. This, says Len, was “a great and happy experience.”

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