About This Image

Photographer stamp on verso of mount.Manuel Komroff was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, editor and translator, as well as a photographer. He was born on the lower East side of Manhattan September 7, 1890, where he began his working life as a journalist.He was a Socialist and when the first Russian revolution took place he went to Petrograd and became the editor in chief of The Russian Daily News, published in English. When the Communists took over, he went to Shanghai, where he worked on The China Press, before returning to the U.S.In the early 1920s, he went to Paris, meeting all the ex-patriots, and became fast friends with Andre Kertesz, beginning a friendship that lasted almost 50 years.He wrote his first novel then and followed that with other novels and non-fiction books. He was an early writer for Camera Work, and a member of the photographers group called the Circle of Confusion.  The Circle of Confusion included Alfred Eisenstadt, Andre Kertesz, Nicolas Muray, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Peter Stackpole, Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, and Roman Vishniac.He studied painting with John Henri and George Luks and lived in New Jersey with photographer Man Ray.  In the 1930s, he took photographs of e.e. cummings, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Leo Stein, Brooks Atkinson, Edgar Varese, Kertesz and others.In 1962, together with photographers Konrad Cramer and Nathan Resnick, he published a book of experimental photographs called The Third Eye, A New World of Exploratory Photography (published in 1962 by Walker & Co., New York). This was about abstract and surrealistic images in coordination with an exhibit which traveled to seven cities under auspices of the State Department.Komroff passed away in Kingston, NY on December 10, 1974. He had been living in nearby Woodstock.

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