Jerome Liebling's images, taken on city streets or in rural towns, defies easy categorization. His images are suffused with startling intimacy; the gaze of his subjects reflecting struggles yet to be overcome. The places, too, bear the traces of time and the scars of victory. And yet the weariness of those faces and places does little to diminish their power. Liebling’s work is a tribute to human perseverance and courage.

Jerome Liebling:Matter of Life and Death featured in the New York Times and the New Yorker

 Mr. Liebling, who became known as a member of the Photo League, a group of socially minded photographers that disbanded in 1951, dug deeply into his subjects, using still photography almost like film, to explore a condition rather than an instant. “He and his subjects are looking at each other,” said Rachel Liebling, who curated an exhibition of her father’s work, which is to run at the Steven Kasher Gallery from March 13 to April 19. “They’re looking at him and he’s looking at them. He felt the regular people were the superstars. Those portraits are about that.”

“O’er the green mead the sporting virgins play, their shining veils unbound along the skies, tossed and re-tossed, the ball incessant flies."

- Homer

According to Tom O’Conner’s History of Handball, the earliest mention of the game can be found as far back as 2000 BC in Egypt. The priests of the Temple Osiris in Thebes were depicted on the tombs, striking the ball with the hand. The game meandered to Europe, before Alexander the Great spread it around the Greek Colonies and the Apennine Peninsula (Italy). Accounts of handball are found in Scotland in 1427, where King James was a known fanatic, amongst the aristocracy of 18th century London, and finally, in its most reliable depiction, was introduced to the United States by Irish immigrants in the waning years of the 19th century. The game eventually settled in Brooklyn where it made its way into the DNA of an adolescent Jerome Liebling.