Kaplan’s legendary career as a photographer, and his influence as a printer for other photographers and as a teacher, is well known.  His own work, however, has been seen only in intervals over the last few decades.

As a ten-year-old in the South Bronx, Sid Kaplan was “hypnotized -- almost addicted,” he recalls, after he first saw a print come up in the developer.

After graduating from The School of Industrial Arts, a Manhattan vocational high school (which closed in 1959 or 1960), Sid worked from 1956 until 1962 at a series of nondescript minimum-wage jobs in the photography industry.  As Sid describes, “It was a perfect way to learn, to sharpen up and practice my craft and skills at someone else’s expense.”  These years eventually led to a black-and-white printer’s position at Compo, the premiere custom lab in Manhattan (on 41st Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues) that was famous for printing Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

At Compo, Sid printed for some of the greatest photographers of the last 50 years, including Philippe Halsmann, Robert Capa, Weegee, and most of the members of Magnum.  In his first days at Compo, Sid worked on making prints for The Family of Man.  “At the time, I didn’t realize that it was my first big show and Steichen’s last,” Sid remembers.

In 1968 Sid left Compo to become an independent printer.  “My life had become too much darkroom and not enough photography,” he decided.  At 10 East 23 Street Sid built a darkroom and set up shop, printing “any- and everything that came through the door.”  W. Eugene Smith occupied an adjacent loft for several years, and Ralston Crawford was a neighbor.  Ralph Gibson introduced Sid to Robert Frank in 1969 and Sid became Frank’s printer, a relationship that continues to this day.  (At the time, Aperture was republishing The Americans and Frank was making the film Conversations in Vermont.)  Sid’s clientele grew to include Allen Ginsberg, who also became a neighbor when Sid relocated his darkroom to Avenue A in the East Village.  From 1972-2024 Sid was a faculty member of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he taught black-and-white darkroom courses.

All of this printing and darkroom work has served to support his own photography, however. “I always figured that photography was best practiced as a gentleman’s hobby, like Lartigue or Stieglitz.  I never wanted it to become just a job where art directors and deadlines ruled; that would make me crazy.”  Printing other people’s work gave him the money to pursue his own work.

Kaplan has been called “the greatest printer in the world” for good reason.  Not only does this accolade manifest itself in his own work, but it refers to his long reputation as a printer for Robert Frank, Weegee, W. Eugene Smith, Ralston Crawford and Allen Ginsberg, among many others.

Kaplan’s subjects are The Bronx and his friends in the 1950s; roads and parks and people of New York in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, plus 20 years’ worth of images from one Mummer’s club in Philadelphia; the highways of America as seen from the window of a speeding car; and the disappearing Jewish and Eastern European culture of New York’s Lower East Side.  His eye is distinguished by graphic plays of light and dark tones, sharp angles and a tendency toward high-contrast images.  Arresting in their formal arrangement, his pictures are exciting for their visceral qualities of light and dark as rendered in traditional gelatin silver prints.

Kaplan lives and works in New York City.