Clemens Kalischer was born in 1921 in Germany, fled with his family to France in 1933, and immigrated to the United States in 1942. He began taking photographs soon thereafter. “Most of my work has been self-assigned and self-taught,” he says. Kalischer documented the arrival of Holocaust refugees to the U.S. in the late 1940s, and over the next several decades he traveled throughout Europe and the U.S. capturing everyday scenes from people’s lives. The images on these pages depict art students and artists in New England and New York from the 1950s through the 1980s.

— Ed.