Harold Feinstein

Harold Martin Feinstein was born in 1931 in Brooklyn. He died in 2015 in Merrimac near Boston. 

American photographer and photography teacher, he is famous for his photographs of Coney Island and Manhattan jazz clubs of the 1950s. 

He was the youngest of five children born to Jewish immigrant parents. His mother Sophie Reich immigrated to the United States from Austria and his father Louis immigrated from Russia. He began to practice photography in 1946 at the age of 15, borrowing a Rolleiflexcamera from a neighbor. Feinstein joined the Photo League in 1948 at the age of 18. 

By 19 he had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Feinstein had his first exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1954 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957. He later held solo exhibitions at the George Eastman Museum (1957) and Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery (1958). 

His photographs were published on the inaugural cover of the literary magazine Evergreen Review and in the leftist journal Liberation. Critics of the period referred to Feinstein as a master of his art, and his work was influential in the development of the New York School of Photography.