Between 1979 and 1989, Leon Borensztein worked as a traveling portrait photographer, moving through homes and businesses across the United States and making portraits of working-class clients in the style of the Sears Portrait Studios. He set up a generic backdrop behind each sitter, then moved the camera back far enough that the room around the pose entered the frame. That single decision governs the project: the commercial portrait setup and the sitter’s personal surroundings share one rectangle. Clients present themselves formally, as they might for any studio sitting, while their belongings, furnishings, and household spaces supply a second, quieter account of their circumstances.
Borensztein, who emigrated from Poland, was an outsider granted close access, and the pictures hold that position without comment. They are direct rather than sentimental, and exact without reducing their subjects to samples. Seen together, the photographs form what the publisher calls a rich sociological document of American working life in the 1980s; seen individually, they remain compelling portraits. The photographs were made between 1979 and 1989; Nazraeli Press published the book in 2011 as a hardcover of 96 pages with 60 duotone plates, at a scale that lets the details of those rooms register alongside the faces.
The book belongs to a lineage of American vernacular portraiture, yet its method is specific to Borensztein. He takes the studio convention seriously, then lets the room around the sitter complicate it. The result resists both documentary captioning and the habit of treating ordinary people as anonymous types. Borensztein’s photographs are held by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
For collectors of late-twentieth-century American photography and of the portrait book as a form, this is a substantial example. The ten-year span is documented on the title, the photographic credit is complete, and the duotone production is considered. It rewards slow looking, the kind the best portrait books are made for.
