Nathan Jaffee (American, 1921-1999)
A native of Brooklyn New York, N. Jay Jaffee began photographing in 1947 initially as a catharsis of his experience as a soldier in WWII. Later he attended classes taught by Sid Grossman of the Photo League and met with Edward Steichen, then the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen encouraged Jaffee and requested three prints by him which became part of the museum's permanent collection.
A major one-person show, “Inward Image,” was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1981. Many exhibits followed, and his work was added to many major museums and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress, the National Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the International Museum of Photography and Film (George Eastman House), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.
A book of his photographs, N. Jay Jaffee: Photographs 1947–1956, was published in 1976. His work has also been included in many anthologies and group exhibition catalogues.
In September 1999, a 50-year retrospective, “Coney Island to Camusett: The Photographic Journey of N. Jay Jaffee: 1947–1999,” organized before his death in March of that year, was shown at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York.