To Mom and Dad, With love and gratitude.
—Nina and Lisa
CONTENTS 11 PREFACE Nina Rosenblum and Lisa Rosenblum 15
NAOMI ROSENBLUM: SHE TAUGHT THE WORLD Deborah Willis 19
A HUMANIST VISION: THE ROSENBLUM FAMILY COLLECTION Barbara Tannenbaum 33
L’INDOMITA NAOMI ROSENBLUM: WOMAN AND SCHOLAR Enrica Viganò 39
IDENTIFYING A BROADER HORIZON Diana C. Stoll 45
SONYA STARR: A COLLECTOR’S LEGACY Lisa Rosenblum xx ARTISTS AND WORKS xx CREDITS
Tannenbaum
The great social peril is darkness and ignorance. What then is required? “Light! Light in floods.”
—Lewis Wickes Hine, quoting Victor HugoWhen treasured friends like Naomi and Walter Rosenblum are gone, what remains? Memories, in the hearts and minds of the many lives they touched. Professional achievements, including rich bodies of scholarship and photography. And an art collection: a portrait in objects that reflects seven decades of shared experiences, beliefs, intellectual life, and passions.
This book illustrates around one hundred works. They are highlights of the broader and larger group of works amassed by two generations of the Rosenblum family: Walter and Naomi; their daughters, Lisa and Nina; Lisa’s spouse, Sonya Starr; and Nina’s spouse, Daniel Allentuck. An iconic work that held hallowed space on the wall of the family’s apartment illustrates this generational continuity: Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalent (1930; p. xx). Walter and Naomi, who owned the print for many years, gave it to Lisa and Sonya, one of the early images in the younger couple’s collection. The Rosenblums’ Equivalent, like the others in Stieglitz’s lengthy series of views of clouds unhinged from any reference to earth and human creation, is an almost abstract image, intended to capture and communicate pure emotion.
While the collection also includes paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, its main emphasis is photography, a natural
Dovunque s’incontra la vita, s’incontra la bellezza. / Wherever you encounter life you encounter beauty. —Mario De Biasi
Naomi Rosenblum represents History for me: the history of photography experienced from the inside and the history of photography studied seriously, sagaciously, and with an open mind.
You can well imagine my excitement when, in the early 1990s, a friend in common set up a meeting with Naomi and Walter Rosenblum in an Italian restaurant in New York. There’s nothing riskier than inviting Italians to an Italian restaurant abroad, but it was Walter’s favorite one, and he was convinced this was the best way to welcome us. I don’t remember a single thing about the food, but I do remember the whole conversation because it marked a change in my professional life. It opened my eyes and filled my mind with ideas.
Sitting before me was a couple who had shared crucial decades in the development of the language of photography with all the great names I had studied in books—a couple who had played a pivotal role in the prolific and impassioned exchange of ideas with the photographers of the golden age of documentary photography. They had been at the center, during a time when we were all pondering the function of photography, its potential in communication, the aesthetic of the shot and the print, and the ways images could impact world events.
Diana C. Stoll
Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.
—W. Eugene Smith
With Naomi Rosenblum’s death at the age of ninety-six in February 2021, an era came to a close. Historian, author, educator, curator, champion, mentor: in all these capacities, Rosenblum was a touchstone for many in the field of photography—so deeply embedded in the fabric of it, indeed, that some may be unaware of how their world has been shaped by her. Her research was disseminated primarily through her teachings, at such institutions as Brooklyn College, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design, and City University of New York’s Graduate Center; her lectures at museums and cultural institutions worldwide; and her writings, most notably two encyclopedic works: A World History of Photography (1984) and A History of Women Photographers (1994), both published by Abbeville Press (Fig. X). <Fig. S44>
Although born in California, Rosenblum was a New Yorker to the bone, complete with a warm lilt in her accent and the deep cultural moxie with which the city imbues many of its longtime residents. She received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1948; three decades later she earned a PhD from CUNY’s Graduate Center, presenting a dissertation on the early work of Paul Strand, with whom she was good friends. It was at Brooklyn
Lisa Rosenblum
Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold. —W. Eugene Smith
Beautiful and vivacious, Sonya Starr, loved and lived life to the fullest, before she passed away prematurely, at age sixty-eight, in 2015. My partner of over thirty years, she was a true collector, blessed with a special eye for beauty and a passion for finding and living with works of art. With Sonya as the captain, and my parents, Walter and Naomi, as helpful and wise counselors, she and I built a collection. The images and sculptures we chose, though bearing our personal stamp, are imbued with a humanist sensibility and profound appreciation of aesthetics that informs our family collection as a whole.
Raised by a strong and loving grandmother and mother in a close-knit Russian family that had escaped Stalinist Russia, Sonya came to New York City as a very young girl (Fig. X). When her father, a noted Dostoevsky scholar, joined the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the family relocated to Troy, New York, where Sonya, recognized for her intellectual promise, entered Russell Sage College at age fifteen. Though she received a master’s degree in Russian literature from the State University of New York, was fluent in Russian, French, and Spanish, and had studied art and art history, Sonya nevertheless realized she had a unique talent for business. She also had an appreciation for
