Simpson Kalisher (July 27, 1926 – June 13, 2023) was an American professional photojournalist and street photographer whose independent project Railroad Men attracted critical attention and is regarded as historically significant.

[3] After the war Kalisher undertook a BA in History at Indiana University Bloomington, graduating in 1948[4] whereupon he immediately started in commercial photography, freelancing for Scope Associates whose clients included Texas Co. in the oil industry of the Kalispell area,[5] and one of his pictures, taken for the company pre-1954, of two women in frilly aprons backlit and chatting at the gate of a house, was chosen by Edward Steichen for MoMA's world-touring The Family of Man, seen by nine million visitors.

[38][39] During the 1950s he joined others freely practicing social documentary photography as an emerging art form; he befriended Garry Winogrand, who grew up near Kalisher, and his associates Guy Gillette, Jay Maisel, and John Lewis Stage as well as Lee Friedlander, who arrived in New York in 1955.

[43] In 1957 he joined Winogrand in meetings of an informal group of independent photographers, with Lee Friedlander, David Vestal, Saul Leiter, Walt Silver and Harold Feinstein in John Cohen's loft.

In 1959 members and associates of the independent group, Kalisher, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Ray Jacobs, Saul Leiter, Jay Maisel, Walt Silver, David Vestal and Garry Winogrand signed a letter of objection, sending it to MoMA, which may have influenced Edward Steichen in a decision not to continue supporting PFA beyond its initial exhibition.

Kalisher was listed in a document with other photographers Garry Winogrand, Hans Namuth, Harry Callahan, Roy De Carava, amongst numbers of artists and musicians as attending a public meeting of the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy in Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1960.

"[59] Kalisher photographed several significant people; his candid series of poet Reuel Denney speaking were used by anthropologist Margaret Mead as examples in her 1955 update of Charles Darwin's The Expression of the emotions in man and animals.

[22][60] He photographed Mead too,[61][60] and designer Paul Rand,[15] artist Peter Voulkos,[10] entrepreneur Mitch Kapor,[62] philosopher Marshall McLuhan, and conductor Newell Jenkins.

Even while he was recording "the remarkable decency of these mature human faces and the brotherhood of the men's vocation" (as Jonathan Williams puts it in the introduction) he was tape-recording their thoughts, their memories.

In Railroad Men we have a social document conveyed through two media of communication, a rare blending of two pieces of machinery (the camera and the tape recorder) to produce a poetic essay.

[69]John Upton in Aperture, 1962, was more guarded in his praise, conceding that Railroad Men represents "the efforts of a photojournalist to come to grips with his medium on his own terms, without the pressures of deadline or editors", inspired while on a magazine assignment, and the taped interviews "an attempt to bring to life the romance and lore of this peculiarly American industry", but notes that though the skilful photographs are clearly the work of a "bread and butter photojournalist [they] often lack the poetic edge that turns fact into truth.

"[70] Edith Weigle in the Tribune of Kalisher's 1962 show at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote They are powerful because of the photographer's ability to get at the essentials and to comprehend and portray the character of each man.