No group image exists of the three German émigrés, Kurt S(z)afranski, Ern(e)st Mayer and Kurt Kornfeld, who founded The Black Star publishing agency in 1936. The agency established itself as a well-run networking institution for emigrant and local photographers in New York. The agency was located in the Graybar Building at 420 Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Station. This central location in Midtown Manhattan provided quick and easy accessibility for photographers and customers and also benefited from being in the immediate vicinity of other photo agencies (Rapho Guillemette, PIX., Three Lions Press, Camera Feature, Photo Representatives, Monkmayer, European Picture Service), photo labs (Leco Photo Service, Service Photo Suppliers, Modernage, Spiratone, Pavelle Laboratories) and the headquarters of several magazines (Life, Look, Popular Photography, Graphic House). Its proximity to Grand Central Station was also important when sending and receiving photographs by train. Interestingly, a number of other photo agencies, such as Ewing Galloway, had their offices in the Graybar Building, which also housed the headquarters of Condé Nast (Vogue, Glamour), as well as such magazines as This Week Magazine, U.S. Camera and Esquire. This accumulation of photo agencies and media outlets allowed picture agents to move from business to business simply by changing floors. With the economy depleted after the Great Depression, many buildings stood empty. It is for this reason that Black Star was excused from paying rent for the first six months of tenancy. Today, the Graybar Building is still connected to Grand Central Station and is occupied by a wide range of different offices.

The aim of the photojournalistic agency was to foster an economic network between photographers and the magazines/newspapers developing new visual aesthetics for photo stories. Safranski, Meyer and Kornfeld were in close contact with the newly-founded Life magazine (1937) and played a major role in establishing photojournalism in New York. With the increasing demand for images coming from the magazines, photo agencies such as Black Star were able to deliver high quality photographic reproductions in quantity. The funding of such collaborations benefited from the large amount of press images that had “emigrated” from Ernest Mayer’s erstwhile Mauritius photo agency in Berlin to New York (the pictures can be found in the Online Collection of the Ryerson Image Center) and from the existing links to European photo agencies who could deliver images of Europe to New York. Kornfeld, Mayer and Safranzki had already been embedded in the German publishing and media sector in the 1920s and new each other from their times in Germany. Kornfeld worked as an editing publisher and Safranski was the manager of the Ullstein magazine publishing house in Berlin, while Mayer worked for Rowohlt and later found his own publishing company and photo agency Mauritius. Also in 1936 Black Star opened a European branch in London in response to  the high demand for foreign images in the US and the need for a managing office.

The "black star" logo and stamp can today be found on the back of many photos taken by émigré photographers working for and with the agency. These include Fred Stein, Walter Sanders (Süßmann), Ruth Bernhard, Andreas Feininger, Fritz Goro (the husband of Carola Gregor), Ilse Bing, Fritz Henle, Herbert Matter, Roman Vishniac, Lilly Joss Reich, Trude Geiringer, Lisa Rothschild (Larsen), Kurt Severin, Werner Wolff, as well as many more. For all of them, Black Star, as a German-speaking agency, provided a great starting point when they first arrived in the United States, allowing them both to earn money from their photography and to enter the New York photojournalism scene. Furthermore, Black Star achieved in establishing an international network and cooperated with many émigrés photographers as for example with Ernst Schaeffer in Bombay.

In addition to the work he did for the agency, Kurt Safranzki also held workshops such as “Pictorial Journalism“ at the New School for Social Research and published a photo-manual Selling Your Pictures (Ziff Davis Publishing, 1940).
As the agency saw itself as a business, the images were collected by topic rather than by photographer and are held according to this system at the Collection of the Ryerson Image Center – unfortunately, almost all of the correspondence was deleted, making it difficult for today's researchers into the history of this émigré photo agency.