Dec 6, 2014 3 min read

Arthur Leipzig, a documentary photographer known for his crisp, detailed, emotionally provocative images, particularly those of children at play on the streets and piers of mid-20th-century New York City, died Friday at his home in Sea Cliff, N.Y. He was 96.

Leipzig was one of the last surviving members of a generation of socially minded photographers – others included Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, Jerome Liebling and Gordon Parks – who took to the streets to record life as they encountered it.

He began photographing New York children in the early 1940s and continued, off and on, into the mid-1960s. To look at these pictures today is to catch intimations of the evanescence of both youth and a city.

In his 1995 book, “Growing Up in New York,” Leipzig called himself “witness to a time that no longer exists, a more innocent time.”

“We believed in hope,” he wrote.

Leipzig became staff photographer at the New York evening newspaper PM in 1942. He then worked for International News Photos, a Hearst operation, before becoming a freelancer for many publications, including The New York Times. From 1968 to 1991, he was an art professor at C.W. Post College of Long Island University.

Leipzig’s 1943 photograph “King of the Hill” – in which two Brooklyn boys square off atop a mound of dirt – was chosen by Edward Steichen, director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, for his celebrated “Family of Man” exhibition of 1955. The show’s theme was the universality of human experience.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Leipzig ranged far beyond New York. Whether on assignment or just to satisfy his artistic impulses, he roamed from an Ethiopian classroom to a Honduran jungle to the Puerto Rican home of the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. His pictures of Sudanese tribesmen and fishermen being tossed in a North Atlantic storm were praised as insightful as his photographs of window washers at work on the side of the Empire State Building.

Leipzig’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. He had two dozen one-man exhibitions and published four books of photographs.

In 2004, he was awarded the Lucie Award for fine arts photography by the Lucie Foundation, which honors master photographers and helps emerging talents.

He was born Isidore Leipzig on Oct. 25, 1928, in Brooklyn. He never used his original first name and legally changed it to Arthur as an adult. Besides his daughter, Judith, Leipzig is survived by his wife of 72 years, the former Mildred Levin; his son, Joel; three grandsons; and a great-granddaughter.