I was born in Bad Nauheim, Germany to Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the United States and raised me and my three brothers in New York City.

I was fortunate to be exposed to museums and galleries from an early age and majored in art at Boston University, eventually earning my master’s degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

After meeting the noted photographer and Yale professor, Tod Papageorge, I linked up with a group including Tod and Gary Winogrand, traversing New York City with our Leicas held mid-body, documenting street scenes in quirky and quasi- journalistic style. 

In 1977, I wandered into a gallery opening on 57th street with my camera and asked if I could take some pictures. I loved the resulting black and white photos juxtaposing topless showgirls with a jaded art crowd.

As I started to photograph more events, I met the publicists for a soon-to-be-opened club called Studio 54 where I became part of the core group of photographers who were invited for special events.  I was there on its opening night, April 26, 1977, and covered it until it closed in 1980.

During that pre-digital time, photographers would bring their work to the photo editors at magazines and newspapers. One day, I ventured up to Newsweek Magazine with a striking image of Grace Jones. It ended up in the magazine’s Newsmakers section that week. This led to a freelance relationship with Newsweek which lasted over thirty years.

My Newsweek assignments found me covering film premieres, Fashion Week events, the US Open, the Grammys, the MTV Awards, the Tonys, the Met Costume Gala, political fundraisers, charity balls etc.   For a year, I covered America’s first female vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, during Walter Mondale’s presidential bid.

I also photographed notable personalities in Houston on assignment for Vanity Fair.  I flew on the Concorde to attend Malcolm Forbes’ 70th birthday extravaganza in Tangiers. I even covered a museum opening in Haiti with Baby Doc in attendance.

In 1981, I received an emerging artist grant from the National Endowment of the Arts with a proposal to photograph the Cannes Film Festival. I have since shot the festival numerous times and in 2022 a selection of my Studio 54 photographs were auctioned at Cannes to benefit AIDS.

Over nearly five decades, my work has appeared in such publications as People, Time, Women’s Wear Daily, and Vogue, and since the invention of digital syndication, in numerous media outlets across the world. 

I was profiled in New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Mademoiselle and other publications

I was married to a wonderful man, Michael Gordon, a former baseball player and police detective, who sadly left the world in 2021?  And I am the mother of three beautiful children and four highly photogenic grandchildren.

I still photograph nearly every day. I am also currently in the laborious process of trying to organize my archive, corralling my massive physical stash of slides and negatives into manageable bites of scanned images. (If only I had started in the age of digital photography where photos can be accessed with the tap of a finger)

I would much rather be out in the world shooting!