Mark Feldstein

Mark Feldstein was born in Milan, Italy, in 1937 and like many immigrants, he and his family made New York their new home. Spending his childhood and adolescence in New York, Feldstein was intimately familiar and in sync with the rhythms of the city’s busy streets. As an adult, he kept a home and studio on Bond Street, where he had constant contact with the same streets and buildings over many years. He was one of the earliest artists to take inspiration from the Bowery, a lower Manhattan neighborhood that would later become a hub for a robust community of artists in the 1970s and 80s.

First a graduate of and then professor at Hunter College, New York, Feldstein would utilize his photographs for compositional inspiration for his paintings. Gradually the time he spent photographing and printing overtook his studio practice, until he abandoned painting altogether to focus on the rich new territory of fine art photography. The artist first exhibited his photography in 1972, and his photographs were featured in April of 1974 to wide critical acclaim in the group exhibition “Manhattan Now” at the New-York Historical Society.

A skilled printer, Feldstein was able to capture sharp details and a full range of the greyscale. In the artist’s democratic eye, all objects, depths, and surfaces are given equal attention. The same compositional treatment is given to decorative architectural elements as utilitarian pipes or objects, and a range of texts are captured, from street signs to graffiti. In his photographs from 1976-77, Feldstein began experimenting with transparent surfaces. These photographs express a new depth as the lens focuses through fences, windows, screens, and transparent fabric.

Feldstein’s signature practice of taking long meandering walks around the city for inspiration can be traced to the 1950s group of French avant-garde artists known as the Situationists International. A strategy the Situationists often employed was called the dérive (deviation), in which wandering through urban areas opens the possibility of new experiences. By allowing the city to guide his body through chance and intuition, Feldstein opened himself to unfixed, undetermined, and unpredictable experiences through the lens of his camera.

The arc of Mark Feldstein’s career, from over a decade practicing and exhibiting painting to his subsequent transition to photography, reflects the transformation of the medium of photography in the 20th century. As recently as the 1960s photography was considered more akin to a craft than a fine art. In the 1970s, Feldstein helped to push the wheels of art history forward by establishing Hunter College’s first Department of Photography. Later, in the 1980s, Feldstein and his colleague Roy de Carava were instrumental in making photography part of Hunter’s MFA program. He died in 2001.