Photographer Leonard Nadel

Biography adapted from various sources.

American, b. 1916, d. 1990.

Leonard Nadel was born in New York City to Austrian-Hungarian immigrant parents who worked in the garment district. By the 1940s, he was a photographer working for the Los Angeles Housing Authority. He documented the privations that low-income families faced in their living conditions. Throughout his career, he balanced his social conscious with his need to pay the bills.

In the 1950s, he built a successful commercial photography business in LA. But in 1957, he read a book by Ernesto Galarza, entitled Strangers in Our Fields, exposing the terrible conditions of migrant Mexican farm workers in the bracero program. Setting aside his commercial work, Nadel obtained a grant from the Fund for the Republic and devoted most of 1958 to creating a visual counterpart to Strangers in Our Fields. Often living with the men in their camps, he photographed filthy quarters, overcrowded conditions, inadequate sanitary and eating facilities, dangerous transportation methods, and substandard medical provisions. Moving into the fields, he then captured men at work. Nadel carefully organized his images, agressively lobbied editors, and eventually created two classic photo essays, which he published in Jubilee and Pageant magazines. His work with the braceros was recently organized into a touring exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution.

In the 1960s, Leonard and his wife, Los Angeles Times reporter Evelyn De Wolfe Nadel, travelled around the world in search of photo stories they could sell to magazines like LOOK. In 1962, Leonard served as the President of the Southern California chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. Author Richard Steven Street – in his book Photographing Farmworkers in California – described Leonard as "worldly, handsome, [and] silver-haired… Nadel had an adventurous bent and social values that always steered him toward the less fortunate members of society."

At last report, Leonard's wife Evelyn Nadel still survives in Los Angeles. With funding, this biography will be expanded.