Photographer, movie house founder Kattelson dies
RHINEBECK, N.Y. >> Sy Kattelson, a photographer with longtime local ties who developed a following during the 1940s heyday of street photography and later founded the Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock, has died at age 95.
Kattelson, who in recent years lived in Saugerties, died Saturday, Nov. 24, at the Baptist Home at Brookmeade in Rhinebeck.
A tribute written by his daughter, Raina Kattelson of Red Hook, said Kattleson’s “earliest work documents working-class New Yorkers during the years immediately following World War II.”
Raina Kattelson wrote that her father “was an early practitioner of street photography and was associated with the Photo League from 1947 until its closing in 1951.”
According to The Jewish Museum, which features Kattelson’s work in its permanent collection, he attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City before becoming a darkroom assistant at the StoneWright Studio and later becoming a part of the Photo League.
In a 2017 New York Times article, Kattelson said he began taking photographs during World War II before “documenting the street life of lower-middle class New Yorkers.”
“Most people doing that type of work were doing poverty-stricken people, like on the Lower East Side,” Kattelson told the Times. “I started to think, ‘What about people like me, who are not in poverty?’ So I tried to show people what they were living like.”
Raina Kattelson wrote that her father’s photographs were “frequently taken while traveling through the streets or riding the New York City’s subways, [and] convey the dignity of his subject’s lives.
“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 private individuals in a public space,” she wrote.
Kattelson founded the Tinker Street Cinema in 1961. Raina Kattelson said it was “the first independent art house theater outside of a major city.”
The movie theater was taken over by Rhinebeckbased Upstate Films in 2010, after Kattelson no longer was associated with it.
Before founding the cinema, Kattleson worked with Woodstock-based Simulaids to develop realistic skin and wound colors for prosthetic devices, according to the family.
Later in life, Kattelson taught himself how to play the clarinet, saxophone and harmonica and was a member of Holly Cantine’s Woodchuck Hollow Brass and Woodwind Choir, according to his daughter.
Kattelson also taught himself website design and created a site to showcase his photographs, she said.
Rather than wait to be drafted, in 1942 he volunteered for the U.S. Army 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. He later enrolled in the Hans Hofmann School of Art.
His work was represented in the original “This is the Photo League” exhibit of 1948 and the “New Workers” exhibit of 1949.
An obituary provided by the family said Kattelson served as an executive member and teacher at the Photo League until it disbanded in 1951, during the Red Scare, after being declared “subversive” and a front for the Communist Party. The league, while not directly allied with the Communist Party, originally was called the Workers Film and Photo League and had its origins in Europe as the “Workers as Photographers” movement. It counted among its members many people who were socially and politically progressive.
From 1953 to 1955, Kattelson worked as a fashion photographer for Glamour magazine and for other fashion and travel magazines, photographing models in outdoor urban settings.
Kattelson’s photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Na-
tional Portrait Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Art Institute of Chicago, The New York Transit Museum, The Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, The National Gallery of Canada, and The Musee d’Art Moderne in St. Etienne, France.
Kattelson was born Feb. 11, 1923 in the Bronx to Robert and Bertha Kattelson.
He was predeceased by his ex-wife, Estelle Haber. He is survived by their daughter, Raina Kattelson, and son-in-law, Bob Butscher; and three grandchildren, Maeve and Romi Butscher of Red Hook, and Jason Butscher of Brooklyn.
The family is planning to celebrate Kattelson’s life with family and friends at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 26, at the home of Raina Kattelson