Bob Adelman took photography classes with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School in the 1950s and became one of the photographers regularly documenting the life of the New School in the 1970s and 1980s. [1] He also taught photography courses at the school, including “Thinking Images and Innovative Images” from 1976 to 1977, and “Photo Reporting” from 1985 and 1988. His beautifully composed and lively shots provide direct insight into the everyday life on campus, and were used in course catalogs and promotion materials for the school for many years.

A child of Eastern European immigrants, Robert (Bob) Adelman was born in Brooklyn in 1930, and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School, he graduated from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s degree, from Columbia University with a master’s degree in philosophy, and he also studied law at Harvard University. [2]

As the volunteer photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNNC), his iconic photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and of sit-ins and civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama and Washington, D.C., made him one of the most important photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. [3] At the same time, he was a prolific writer of 75 books on various subjects. Adelman also photographed all of the main players of the arts world in New York of the 1960s, such as Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. He maintained a life-long friendship and continued to play chess regularly with Lichtenstein. Adelman moved to Miami Beach, Florida in 1997, where he lived and worked until his death in 2016. [4]

Adelman published his photographs in Look, Life, and the New York Times, and he received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work can be found in major collections such as the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, where he was named a consultant photographer in the last two years of his life. [5]

He was committed to documenting a broad array of social concerns of his time, especially poverty, housing, and education, and he worked for the Office of Economic Opportunity. “When I photographed, I was intent on telling the truth as best I saw it and then to help in doing something about it. It was a constant effort not only to document in as honest a way as I could, and to make what I was seeing vivid, but to figure out how to change things,” he explained. [6]