Stone's family were able to emigrate to New York thanks to the assistance of a cousin of her father's and intitially lived in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, then later in Riverdale/The Bronx. Stone's first encounters with a camera had taken place in Germany with a box camera which she used to take photographs of the family. In New York, at the age of fourteen, she started taking photographs in the streets where she lived, capturing the local children at play, and later went on to photograph also in Harlem and the Lower East Side. Stone only learned from her parents that she was Jewish after the family's emigration to New York. “The main reason for our immigration was the fact that we had a Jewish background. I never knew it until I came to the United States. Our parents kept everything from us because at Hitler’s time everybody was spying and it was very easy to get arrested and they were very fearful that we would say something. I was shocked when I found out about my Jewish background. At some point I became anti-Semite when I lived in Hitler’s Germany. Therefore it was hard for me to conciliate with the fact that I have a Jewish background. But not anymore. So we were a very poor immigrant family. As I remember, I worked all throughout my childhood. I started as a babysitter, then got more serious jobs. We always had a lack of money in our family. Thus I think it’s logical that I am more attracted to poor people and their lifestyle. When I became a little older I started to wander around Harlem and Lower East side and photograph poor people. There is where I found a lot of people with unconventional stories and I wanted to tell them through my photographs. I was not attracted to the posh, fancy areas such as Park Avenue.“ (Korbut 2015)

Through her father’s friendship with the émigré photographer Fritz Henle, Erika Stone get a job at the Leco Photo Service. This was her stepping stone into the photo scene in New York, where in 1941 she joined the Photo League and studied photography under Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Research.
Reports in the school's journal reveal that her studies provided her with a successful start as a photographer and in 1951 she was honoured in Life magazine's Young Photographer’s Contest and, in 1953, in Photography magazine's International Picture Contest.
Although she gained technical and practical knowledge from her time studying under Berenice Abbott, for her 1930s New York shoots Stone preferred to shoot with more mobile cameras rather than the large-format camera and tripod used by Abbot. Stone deepened her urban exploration tours with her camera throughout New York, focusing on everyday street scenes and frequenting bars and restaurants. In her photographic series on Sammy’s Bowery bar in 1946, she portrays the life and clients of the bar in humanistic images. Topics of emigration were highlighted in her 1951 series on the Ellis Island immigration station, where the émigré photographer Werner Wolff also produced a series of photographs.
From 1947 until 1953 Stone worked for the European Picture Service, which was founded by the émigré Max Peter Haas.
Her numerous contacts with other photographers and institutions and her knowledge of the photographic scene allowed Stone to open in 1953 the Photo Representatives photo agency together with her friend and photographer Anita Beer. It was located near Grand Central Station and represented such photographers as Weegee and Ellen Auerbach. Besides her career as a freelance photographer, Stone also photographed widely during her travels around the world and during the 1970s and 1980s also published books on children photography, including the 1986 Pro-Techniques of Photographing Children. Other émigré photographers working in the field of children photography were Lilly Joss, Trude Fleischmann, Ernest Nash, Marion Palfi as well as Ellen Auerbach. Erika Stone's residence and working address contain different locations and can can only be assigned to concrete data with difficulty. Nevertheless concrete address can be found on stamps on the back of photographs as well as in the archive of the New School. Therefore, she lived during the 1950s and 1990s in The Bronx, Turtle Bay and Yorkville. She still lives in New York and the courtesy is held by Katrina Doerner.