Carol Kitman, a New York photographer whose chance encounter with twin immigrant brothers in Brooklyn led to a decades-long project documenting their lives, tracking them through bar mitzvahs, weddings, military careers and, during the first Trump administration, the political scandal that made Alexander and Eugene Vindman household names, died on March 3 in the Bronx. She was 96.
Her son, Jamie Kitman, confirmed the death, at a retirement home.
In 1980, Mrs. Kitman was walking the streets of the Brighton Beach neighborhood with her camera, capturing the area’s vibrant immigrant community on film, when she noticed two identical young boys in identical blue sailor suits.
The boys had recently arrived as refugees from Ukraine after their mother had died of cancer. They were with their grandmother, who spoke to them in Yiddish. Mrs. Kitman, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, spoke Yiddish as well, and the two women struck up a conversation. Within minutes, she was photographing the boys, tagging along as they moved energetically from storefront to storefront.
Mrs. Kitman soon lighted on the idea to follow the boys — not just through their day but also through their lives.
“My mother was brought here also at 3 or 4, and her mother had died back in Bialystok, Poland,” she told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2019. “So their having lost their mother really resonated.”
She wasn’t the only documentarian who took interest in the boys: They appeared in Ken Burns’s 1985 film “The Statue of Liberty,” which included an image of them with their grandmother on a boardwalk.
Mrs. Kitman’s relationship with the boys — as well as with their father, Simon, and older brother, Leonid — ended up being more than a photographic project. She invited them to her home in suburban New Jersey for holidays and parties. She attended all the significant events of their lives, including their graduations, weddings and promotions up the ranks of the U.S. Army, both to lieutenant colonel. And she did so always with camera in hand.
“Her initial interest was quite powerful, about these two cute little boys that were getting into trouble and running around,” Alexander Vindman said in an interview. “But after those first photographs, she became part of our lives.”
The Vindmans served on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration. In 2020, they testified in separate hearings about President Trump’s pressure on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of Joseph R. Biden Jr.
As part of his duties, Alexander Vindman in 2019 had listened to a phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky in which Mr. Trump demanded the investigation, as Colonel Vindman recounted in his testimony. Eugene Vindman testified that, as a lawyer for the council, he had raised legal concerns about the pressure campaign.
The hearings resulted in President Trump’s first impeachment. The Trump administration removed both brothers from the National Security Council, and both retired from the military in 2020 because, they said, they had been the targets of retaliation by the White House.
The affair brought the brothers national prominence. Eugene Vindman won election to the House of Representatives from Virginia in 2024 and is running for re-election this year. Alexander Vindman is running for the Senate in Florida. Both are Democrats.
Through it all, Mrs. Kitman was watching. “When you talk about what good immigrants do,” she told The New York Times in 2019, “look at what these immigrants are doing for this country.”
Carolyne Sibushnik was born on Feb. 1, 1930, in Brooklyn. Her parents, Irving and Kate (Perloff) Sibushnik, had immigrated from Eastern Europe as children. Her father operated a food import business, and her mother managed the home.
She met Marvin Kitman in 1948, when they were both working as summer clerks at Macy’s, in Manhattan. They married in 1951.
Mr. Kitman, a longtime TV critic and syndicated columnist, died in 2023. Along with their son, Mrs. Kitman is survived by their daughters, Suzy Kitman and Andrea Knight, and three grandchildren.
Mrs. Kitman graduated in 1952 from Brooklyn College and worked as a substitute teacher in the 1950s and ’60s. After receiving her master’s degree in psychology from the City College of New York in 1971, she was a counselor at an alcohol recovery center, where her patients included the writers John Cheever and Truman Capote.
Mr. Kitman had been an aspiring photographer before setting his camera aside to write. Sometime in the 1960s, Mrs. Kitman picked it up, and by 1975, she was confident enough in her skill to quit her job at the recovery center to be a full-time freelance photographer.
Her pictures appeared frequently in newspapers around New York City and northern New Jersey, including The Times.
Though she took whatever assignments came her way, she was especially taken with immigrant cultures and food. She exhibited her work in New Jersey galleries and community colleges.
But she kept coming back to the Vindman brothers.
“She found us, just kind of discovered us, and we were part of their lives,” Alexander Vindman said of the Kitman family. “But then there was her photography. And so it was just a mixture of those two passions.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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