Gottlieb, Steven 1946-

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GOTTLIEB, Steven 1946-

PERSONAL:

Born 1946. Education: Graduate of Columbia University, 1968, and Columbia Law School.

ADDRESSES:

Home—98 Bohemia Ave., P.O. Box 9, Chesapeake City, MD 21915. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Photographer, beginning mid-1980s; author. Practiced law in New York, NY, and Washington, DC. Horizon Creative Escapes (photography workshop), founder. Exhibitions: Photography represented in corporate and governmental collections, including those of Dow Chemical, McKinsey and Company, Eastman Kodak, Marriott, Covington and Burling, IBM, and the U.S. State Department.

WRITINGS:

Washington, Portrait of a City: Photographs, foreword by Frank Getlein, Acropolis Books (Washington, DC), 1985, revised edition, Taylor Trade Publishers, 2004.

American Icons, Roberts Rinehart Publishers (Lanham, MD), 2001.

Abandoned America, Sleeping Bear Press (Chelsea, MI), 2002.

A Bachelor.com: A Memoir of Dating and Relationships (nonfiction), Icon Books, 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Steven Gottlieb left a successful career in law in the mid-1980s when his first book of photography, Washington, Portrait of a City: Photographs, was published. As Gottlieb said in an interview for Kodak Online, "I took the first copy off the press, walked into the chairman of the board's office, signed it for him, shook his hand and said, 'Ed, thanks very much; I'm outta here.'" Gottlieb had told his boss that when the book reached publication, he would be giving up law to pursue his lifelong love of photography.

The book that profiled Washington became a big hit there, but Gottlieb, who with his busy schedule had never had time to take photography courses, was really just beginning. He gradually acquired large corporate and advertising clients, among them Dow Jones, Pfizer Chemical, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Ogilvy and Mather, and others.

Gottlieb's second book, American Icons, contains photographs taken in forty states and showcases images representative of American heritage. Images include the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The book was published on September 10, 2001, the day before terrorist attacks destroyed the iconic New York skyscrapers. Mark Bay noted in Library Journal that this book "is especially poignant to consider now that most Americans are reexamining their lives and the very concept of America."

Soon after the release of American Icons, Gottlieb published Abandoned America, a book that honors abandoned bits of America, among them a rusted pickup covered with weeds, as well as factories, bridges, trains, and buildings. Gottlieb had been taking these photographs for some time and collected them in this volume at the urging of a friend. Ruminator Review's Matt Konrad called the images "poignant and often lonely, but, in preserving history's lost details, they're also strangely hopeful."