Before taking up photography, Dan Weiner studied painting at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League, and later worked as a photography instructor in the Air Force during World War II. As a photojournalist after the war, he explored street life in New York (routinely clashing with editors over the presentation of his work) in pursuit of his belief that the photographer’s responsibility was to illuminate societal ills. “My generation is probably the first in history to become conscious of the great forces that are at work in our society through the visual media—the magazine, the newsreel, television,” he once said. Weiner considered Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee influences on his work.