Leonard Nadel (1916–1990) was born in Harlem, New York, to Austro-Hungarian immigrant parents. He served in the Army during World War II, and then pursued a Master’s degree in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He moved to Los Angeles and studied at the Art Center College of Design, and was hired to document living conditions in the city’s slums and new post-war housing projects. For nearly 30 years he worked as a freelance photographer for publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Harvester News, Life, National geographic, Look, Forbes and Paris Match.

Having grown up in the crowded tenements of New York City during the Depression, he always believed he had acquired a more compassionate way of looking at people and their problems. Throughout his career as a photojournalist, he used photography a means to call attention to social contradictions and human suffering. “The new role of the magazine photographer,” he once stated, “is to make such worthwhile projects [i.e., documenting poverty and exploitation] more widely read and their human content enlivened by the visual impact of a sensitive and honest portrayal.”