Younger brother of Soviet filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman who went to France in the mid-1920s and shot all of Jean Vigo's films, among others. In the US after WWII, he photographed a number of shorts and documentaries before being hired as cinematographer on Elia Kazan's "On The Waterfront" (1954).
For the next fifteen years Kaufman remained independent from Hollywood and worked almost exclusively with left-oriented directors on a number of outstanding films shot in New York. He worked on seven Sidney Lumet features including "The Pawnbroker" (1965), a strikingly photographed black-and-white journey through the mind of a concentration camp survivor living in Harlem.