Laurence Salzmann

Most recently, Salzmann has worked in Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, documenting the lives and work of artists and athletes in Cuba, the way of life left behind by Mexican migrants to Philadelphia. A second Fulbright Grant to Peru has provided funding for Salzmann to document ways in which pre-Hispanic culture continue on the lives and culture of Quechua speaking communities of Cusco's Sacred Valley Writing of Salzmann's La Lucha/The Struggle, a study of young athletes training in Castro's Cuba, Miles Orvell wrote “ Salzmann's photographs constitute an aesthetic and social document of great power...and are a tribute to his generous vision of cross-cultural understanding.” (The Photo Review, Vol. 28, No.3, pp 22–23, 2009) Summing up Salzmann's work, Jason Francisco, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Emory College, has written “”The core intelligence of Salzmann's [work] is his non-didacticism, his unwillingness to forsake the suggestive for the merely explanatory ...”

Salzmann's first documentary project, "Family of Luis" (1965), came out of his assignment as a Peace Corps trainee in a barrio humilde of Ciudad Juarez. It attracted the notice of the Photography Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kneeland McNaulty, who bought several prints for their Museum Collection. The "Family of Luis" essay led to Salzmann's being hired as a participant observer and photographer by St. Luke's Hospital Department of Community Psychiatry for a joint project with Columbia University. Again, he lived among his subjects, this time in a Single Room Occupancy hotel, on New York's upper West Side. documenting the lives of its residents. His work, Neighbors on the Block, was published by the New York State Council on the Arts. A grant from the American Film Institute for documentary film making enabled him and filmmaker Peter Barton to complete two films about residents of the hotels. Salzmann took courses in Sociology at the New School of Social Research and earned a Master of Arts in Visual Anthropology from Temple University (1971). This training, in addition to his photographic experience, led to work with Tim Asch as editor for several of the films (Children's Magical Death, New Tribes Mission, Tug of War, Weeding the Garden) in Asch's Yamomoto film series (1971) and as an editor on Alan Lomax's Choreometrics project. A Fulbright grant enabled Salzmann to spend 1974 – 1976 in the small Romanian town of Radauti, documenting the lives of the remaining members of its Jewish community who had survived the Holocaust. Again, Salzmann learned the language of his subjects and lived among them. His pictures were published in the book: The Last Jews of Radauti with text by Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, (Doubleday, 1983). His film, Song of Radauti was broadcast nationwide by PBS. At the invitation of Cornell Capa, Director of the International Center of Photography, a large selection of the Radauti pictures was shown at the International Center of Photography.

Laurence Salzmann (born January 4, 1944) is an American photographer and filmmaker based in Philadelphia. His work, mostly documentary photography, focuses primarily on the lives of little known groups in America and abroad.

Salzmann was born January 4, 1944, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He describes himself as being "of that generation which thought that photography could bring about socially beneficial change." Educated in Philadelphia schools, he acquired photographic skills along the way, often from older photographers. Much of his career has involved using photography to preserve the history of groups of people in danger of being ignored and forgotten and encouraging his subjects to retrieve memories and tell their stories. Edward Sozanski, the late Philadelphia Inquirer art critic, wrote of Salzmann's work, "Cross a visual anthropologist with a talented photographer and you get Laurence Salzmann" and goes on to say that Salzmann's deep immersions in local cultures are "what give his photographs exceptional resonance and poignancy." (Phila. Inquirer, 2008)