Gita Lenz

Gita Lenz (1910–January 20th, 2011) was a New York photographer whose imagery ranges from the humanist to the abstract.

Personal life and early career

Gita Lenz lived for more than sixty years in Greenwich Village on the corner of Carmine and 7th Avenue. She married twice, widowed by her first husband, George Zoul’s death in the Spanish Civil War, she married her second husband, Richard Lenz, in 1940 and divorced eighteen months later. There were no children from either marriage.

Now on her own, and amateur photographer in the 1940s, Lenz strived to find professional work from commercial and editorial clients and was quite successful through the 50s and 60s. Her subject matter was the city and the urban life and environment around her with social documentary, reminiscent of that by Walker Evans and Helen Levitt, being her initial focus before an interest in abstraction emerged. It was her fine art photography that brought her  considerable attention.

Recognition

In 1951, following the success of the exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at the Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen curated its photographic follow-up Abstraction in Photography, introducing “work of photographers concerned with evolving another reality by probing into the realm of the abstract.” Lenz’s pictures could be seen alongside work by Erwin Blumenfeld, Josef Breitenbach, Alexey Brodovitch, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ralston Crawford, Walker Evans, Lotte Jacobi, György Kepes, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Weston

The first major exhibition of Lenz’s work was in a three-person show, The Third Eye with John Reed and Don Normark, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1952. In 1955, Steichen included her work, a picture of a little girl asleep in the sun, in another exhibition at the MoMA, this time in the world-touring The Family of Man, which was seen by 9 million visitors around the world.

Lenz continued taking photographs into the early 1960s, much of it fine art but with some commercial commissions for photo stories, one on the New York cab industry, another for Standard Oil, with other series on coal miners, city children and botanical gardens, amongst formal portraits. However, her financial situation forced her to seek a more reliable income in copywriting and research positions. Gradually she abandoned photography to pursue a less expensive creative interest in writing, mainly poetry.

Obscurity and rediscovery

With the coming of the millennium, Lenz had been forgotten as a photographer and was living alone in her fifth floor flat, but was still photographing views from her fourth-storey window. When she became dependent on a wheelchair the accommodation became too impractical. Neighbour-cum-friend Timothy Bartling (a chef) helped Lenz move into an assisted living facility near her old neighbourhood and looked after her personal affairs. Amongst her belongings he discovered a large archive of photographs that he felt might be valuable and took her in 2002 to meet his friend the photographer Gordon Stettinius during his exhibition opening at Robin Rice Gallery. Subsequently, on seeing her imagery and impressed by its quality, Stettinius offered to archive Lenz’s work which he put into storage at his home in Richmond, Virginia. In 2006 he asked expert friends at Virginia Commonwealth University to assist in sorting through the disorganised mass of negatives, prints and documents. for which he wrote an introduction. It was published in conjunction with the exhibition from September 23 to November 20, 2010 at Gitterman Gallery, New York, which preceded the death of Gita Lenz only by months.

Links

Gordon Stettinius (2011) Gita Lenz: New York Views. The mid-century photographer’s long neglected work is gaining new recognition. Places Journal April 2011. [1]