Edward Schwartz photographs, 1930s-1960s

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Schwartz grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He graduated from Hebrew Technical Institute in 1922 and then attended City College at night while working factory jobs as an engineer during the day. Schwartz joined the Photo League in 1938 and began taking street pictures of New York's immigrant neighborhoods. During World War II he served in the Navy as a SeaBee and continued to take photographs while stationed in Okinawa, Japan. After the war he worked as an assistant for Berenice Abbott. In 1948 or 1949 he completed "Around New York," a documentary film about daily life on the Lower East Side. Schwartz's photographs of New York City street scenes combined elements of photojournalistic and artistic forms. His photographs of the protests against the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are especially significant. In 1949 Angela Calomiris testified that Schwartz was the section organizer of the Photographic Group of the Cultural Section of the American Communist Party. Schwartz continued to work in the construction industry while photographing in his spare time. (Adapted from text by the Jewish Museum)