Josef Breitenbach's exilic route to New York began with his flight to Paris in 1939, followed by internment in three different French camps (Colombes, Bourges, Agen), the long process of acquiring affidavits and visas in Marseille and finally his passage by ship via Trinidad to the United States.

Several letters (including two letters from Fred Stein) document his efforts to get the affidavits and visas required for his passage to New York: on 2 May, 1941, he got the visa from the American Consulate in Marseille which allowed him to leave the internment in Agen. Stein and Breitenbach knew each other from their first exile station in Paris. With the help of the affidavits of two persons, a deposit in the bank and the payment of the ship passage by the American Export Line, he left Europe on the S.S. Winnipeg on 6 May, 1941. Fred Stein took the same ship, but it is not known if the two photographers meet there. As the German émigré photographer Fritz Neugass later wrote in an article reflecting on his own emigration, the S.S. Winnipeg was refuge for many other photographers besides Breitenbach and Stein, including Ylla, Ilse Bing, Charles Leirens and Yolla Nichlas (Neugass 1951). Photographs by Breitenbach, Yolla Nichlas and Ilse Bing manifests the passage from Marseille. As images at the Center for Creative Photography shows Breitenbach photographed with a 35mm camera on the passage. After the S.S. Winnipeg was required to make a detour to Port of Spain in Trinidad, Breitenbach finally arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Acadia on 27 June, 1941. Breitenbach was only able to take about twenty portraits with him to New York. The rest were in Bilbao, waiting to be despatched, but there is no record of them ever having arrived in New York (exh. cat. 1979).

As entries in his address book show, after arriving in New York, Breitenbach tried hard to make contacts in the photography scene and looked for sources of income at photo agencies, magazines and photography schools. According to the dates of the correspondence, however, he had some difficulty obtaining commissions. A fellowship application for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was rejected, and a book project with the London publisher Andor Kraszna-Krausz of Focal Press, which had been in the planning stages since Paris, also failed. Both projects were very innovative and interesting and the reasons for their failure are not known. For the fellowship application Breitenbach revived his experiments in photographing flower fragrance, which he already started in Paris. His aim was to show how the scent of flowers could be made visible by means of photochemical solutions and photographically fixed. These experiments were inspired by and elaborated on the methods of natural scientists. An object with a characteristic odour, such as coffee beans, was placed a few millimetres above a mercury coated plate whose surface was covered with talcum powder. The emitted scent molecules pushed the talcum particles away. The movement created swirling forms that remind one of surrealistic experiments. Over several years, Breitenbach was involved in negotiations with Andor Kraszna-Krausz and Focal Press about a Paris book, intended as a textbook for urban and landscape photography and titled Fotografieren in der Stadt [Photography in the City]. Though Breitenbach travelled to London several times in 1938 and 1939, the correspondence shows that negotiations failed. It can be assumed that their failure to reach an agreement was related to design and finance. Andor Kraszna-Krausz published several photo guides in Great Britain as for example Lighting for Photography by the émigré photographer Walter Nurnberg.

Breitenbach gained American citizenship in 1946 and, on his arrival in 1941, in the middle of the war, was declared an ‘Enemy Alien’ - which meant that he could not go out in public with his camera. However, in January 1942, he got permission for the public use of his photographic equipment for one month. A paper in the archive records it thus: “in connection with portrait and commercial photography and research on color photography […] and only within the confines of New York City and suburbs.” (Breitenbach Archive, AG90:12) During his trips around the city, he took pictures of such popular sights as the elevated train, Radio City at night, the Central Park and St. Patrick's Cathedral and made experimental photomontages of the metropolis. In 1945, he recorded the V-E Day celebrations at the end of World War II, focusing on the surreal, abstract effect of the swirling ticker tape. These photos, with their pictorial, surrealist, experimental and modern language, testify to the multiple creative uses of photography in the urban space. [verlinken Datenbak CCP,] In the first year after his arrival, Breitenbach won his first commission for Fortune magazine, a reportage piece titled “What about steel”. Employing a two-colour process and unusual compositions, he captured the essence of steel, at that time a scarce raw material obtained from scrap heaps. He used a viewpoint that focused on detailed cutouts with surrealistic and abstract stylistics. His experimental surrealistic photography found further success when he participated in a group exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery in 1944.
With the opening of a studio (and residence) at 210 Central Park South in 1941, Breitenbach was able to work again as a portrait photographer, though it is not known how much his income derived from this. He had been a well-known portrait photographer in Munich, where he had his own studio, portraying local intellectuals and artists from the world of theatre (he was portrait photographer for the Münchner Kammerspiele), and continued this activity in Paris. In transcripts, he writes that his approach to the portrait was through psychological characterisation, avoiding glamorising or stereotyping his subjects – an approach also followed by colleagues such as Hermann Landshoff, who took portraits of his subjects in their homes or outdoors, rather than within the confines of a studio.

Before Breitenbach started his teaching career at The Cooper Union in 1946 (until 1966) and at the New School for Social Research in 1949 (until 1969), he gave workshops at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1944 through his connection with Josef Albers. At The Cooper Union, photography was a supplementary course for advertising students and did not include professional training, but Breitenbach conducted practical photographic experiments with his students and focused on a creative approach to photography, seeing his courses as a help to the students in experimenting and finding their own means of expression. He had earlier given private photography lessons at his apartment in Paris and together with the émigré photographer Ruth Staudinger-Rozaffy planned to enlarge his photography school. Documentary accounts of his lessons – mostly material from photographic experiments, and non-objective and surrealistic training – show clearly that they formed the foundation for his later teaching at the The Cooper Union and the New School for Social Research. What makes a good photographer, the extent to which his personality plays a role in the quality of his photographs and his relationship with the mechanical process were questions that always interested Breitenbach. In 1949, Breitenbach joined the photographic circle of other emigrated colleagues such as Marion Palfi, Tim Gidal, Charles Leirens, Lisette Model and Alexey Brodovitch, when he took up a part-time position at the New School for Social Research, where he conducted a variety of different courses and workshops in the field of progressive, technical, experimental, and indoor and outdoor photography. For example, in the autumn semester of 1950, a 15-week “Creative Possibilities in Photography” seminar was held at Breitenbach’s studio, examining the creative use of light, colour and space to reflect objective reality while at the same time developing an original and personal style. In summer 1950, his “Outdoor Color Photography” course, that included two field trips, aimed at conveying to the students how colour appears in reality and in a picture. His “Photography as Art” course followed in 1954. In this and other courses he used reproductions of his own photograph collection as visual teaching material. Unburdened by an attachment to any specific style, phase or region, but rather benefiting from a heterogenic range of photographic fields, Breitenbach developed his own personal methodology for teaching the history and theory of photography. He also showed examples of the work of other emigrated colleagues, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lisette Model, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Erwin Blumenfeld or Ylla. This mixture of European and American photographers highlighted the transnational and transcultural exchange and dynamics in the history of photography.