Godfrey B. Frankel American, 1912-1995 After graduating from Ohio State University in 1935 and working as a newspaperman, Godfrey Frankel (born in Cleveland) moved to Washington, D.C., in 1942 to serve as the nightclub columnist for the Washington Daily News. During the day, he explored the city by bicycle. On one of his excursions in 1943, Frankel discovered the crowded alley neighborhoods of southwest D.C. Fascinated by these hidden enclaves of the city's poor, he returned again and again with his camera to document the everyday life of the people who lived there—particularly the children who played outdoors in the streets. Before long, the neighborhoods were gone, torn down by urban renewal. In 1945 Frankel documented the resettlement of Japanese-Americans uprooted during World War II for the federal War Relocation Authority program. In 1944 Frankel traveled to New York City and met Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged his photographic work. He moved there in 1946, and that year and two years later several of his alley pictures were included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art. He joined the Photo League and began another project: photographing Manhattan's Lower East Side. In 1950 Frankel received a master's degree in social work from Columbia University and moved to Cleveland to work in a community center. Four years later he published Short Cut to Photography, a book geared toward young people. In 1962 Frankel settled in Washington, D.C., to work as a senior consultant for the National Institute on Drug Abuse until his retirement in 1982. In 1988 he received a B.F.A. from the University of Maryland, where he had been a visiting professor of community development and organizational behavior (1980-86). Shortly after Frankel's death in 1995, the Smithsonian Institution Press published a book of his photographs, In the Alleys: Kids in the Shadow of the Capitol. M.M.