Jerome Liebling, whose subtly powerful pictures and the lessons
he drew from them influenced a generation of socially minded
photographers and documentary filmmakers, died on Wednesday in
Northampton, Mass. He was 87.  His death was announced by
Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where he taught for more
than two decades.  Mr. Liebling was among a wave of pioneering
photographers -- including Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Helen
Levitt and Gordon Parks -- who took to the streets of New York
in the 1930s and '40s to make art by turning their cameras onto
corners of urban life that had mostly been ignored by the
photographers before them.  His experience as a child of the
Depression growing up in Brooklyn, Mr. Liebling said, formed an
impulse throughout his career to ''figure out where the pain
was, to show things that people wouldn't see unless I was
showing them.'' Over a half-century much of his work depicted
painful subjects far too directly for magazines or newspapers to
show them: mental patients in sta