Jeff Rothstein is a street photographer. He is a native of Brooklyn and has lived in Manhattan for many years. He has photographed New York City since the early 1970s. He calls himself an urban observer. He tries to capture the city's structures, signs and, most of all, fleeting moments of people on the street.
His photographs have appeared in Black & White magazine, SHOTS, the London Evening Standard and other publications. His photobook Today's Special: New York City Images 1969-2006 was published by Coral Press Arts in June 2017. It is in the collections of many university and institutional libraries.
In the 1980s he photographed the Jewish Lower East Side, in what he calls its waning days. He used Nikon cameras, mostly with Tri-X film for black and white and Kodachrome for color. In 2021 his project Gotham Memories won the Urban Photo Awards exhibition prize, a solo show at the Porec Museum in Croatia. In 2025 he had a solo show, Vintage Gotham, at Foil Gallery in Montreal.
