Bob Edelson

Bob Edelson was born in Brooklyn, New York too many years ago to mention. Always an artist, including painting, photography, and acting, but not able to make a living at it, and married with children, he went into a business most related to his artistic inclinations - the mad avenue advertising business. After thriving in advertising for many years, he retired to indulge in an artistic interest he continued with all those years - photography. Because of his bohemian spririt, and living in New York, he was attracted to and frequented the environs of lower manhattan, e.g., Greenwich Village & SOHO, when SOHO was still in the beginnings of gentrification due to the appeal of new artist studios and galleries that opened there. As he frequented these environs, he photographed them, then sold his photographs, then through the urging of business owners in SOHO, produced the first photo portrait of the area in his first book - SOHO, NYC - which quickly sold out. So, then, another NY themed book - "Below 14th Street". {Both these books are out of print and only available on book resale web sites.) In NY, and in many travels, throughout USA and Europe, in addition to photographing his typical street scenes, cafes, store fronts, and architecture, he photographed street art/graffiti; after many years of this, he found he had an enormous collection of street art and had his first book of these photos published under the title "new American Street Art" (1998} which was so successful, it is now in over 100 library systems throughout the world; this led to his latest book of street art, the most unusual of all street art/graffiti books ever published - "Street Art Noir" (2009).