harry dubin

My friend Autumn shared a post about this earlier this week and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.  Harry Dubin was a grocer in New York in the 1940s.  On the weekends, he would take his teenaged son out and about to get photos of the working people of NYC...sort of.  Actually, they were photos of Harry switching places with the working people of NYC.

"Dad would say, 'Let's do a fireman this week or a street sweeper.' But a plan was one thing; inducing the target to remove his clothes in a nearby alley and hand them over to a total stranger was another."

Jeff Kisseloff came across a 1947 New Yorker article profiling Dubin and decided to take a chance that he was still around.  Lo and behold, not only was Dubin alive, he was still in possession of some of the original photographs and willing to be interviewed.  Kisseloff persuaded Dubin to let him take scans of the photos, and he's been posting them on his blog.  They make for a lovingly eccentric look at New York in the 1940s.  I hope you'll be as captivated as I am.