Arnold Eagle

"We were really recorders of history, and we were also trying to make people aware of the problems that existed."

When Arnold Eagle came to photography in the early 1930's, the Great Depression had paralyzed both urban and rural America, and made New Yorkers familiar with crushing unemployment, breadlines, and tent cities of the homeless along the Hudson. Eagle's social concerns led him to use the camera to record this period of crisis, but like Lewis Hine, the father of American social documentary photography, Eagle wished to show not only what stood to be corrected, but also what was to be appreciated. Thus he was led to preserve for future generations vivid glipmses of a New York that is already receding into the past. His photographs are stamped with the same social curiosity, human compassion, and historical awareness that characterize the man himself.

Christopher Phillips
Visiting Scholar
International Center of Photography

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