WALTER ROSENBLUM PHOTOGRAPHY (In …

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Tender Witness to the Togetherness of People in Want

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: May 1, 1998

Socially engaged, humanistic photography has a long and densely textured history in the United States, one marked by a constant tension between objectivity and empathy, idea and sentiment, the polemical urge and the personal touch.

The artist Walter Rosenblum, 78, holds a distinguished if still under-valued place in that tradition. In a sense, he was born into it. The child of Romanian Jewish immigrants, he was raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets, during the Depression. He was introduced to photography as a teen-ager at a local Boys Club, and in 1937 he joined the politically progressive Photo League, a largely volunteer organization that sponsored workshops, lectures and classes.

There he met two extraordinary figures who became his teachers and his friends. One was Lewis Hine (1874-1940), the sociologist turned photographer who had been using the camera to document the lives of immigrants and workers since 1905. The other was the pioneering modernist Paul Strand (1890-1976).

From each Mr. Rosenblum took different things. Hine’s pictures offered a model of photography as a democratic, socially responsive, reformist tool, with quotidian life as its subject. Strand’s work, exhilaratingly experimental, suggested the medium’s tremendous formal potential. Mr. Rosenblum integrated the example of both artists into the succession of memorable photo essays he created between the 1930’s and the 1980’s.

A sampling of that work is on view in ”Walter Rosenblum, Photographs: A Retrospective Exhibition” at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College in Flushing. The show of 70 images, organized by Jerald R. Green, represents small selections from eight of Mr. Rosenblum’s major series. But it captures the essence of a life’s work, giving a sense both of the consistency of an artist’s vision and of how his thoughts about his medium developed over time.

Early on, Mr. Rosenblum produced work of startling maturity. Working under the nurturing eye of Sid Grossman, the director of the Photo League school, he shot his ”Pitt Street” series over six months in 1938, when he was only 19. Here he stuck close to a subject he knew intimately: daily life in a tenement neighborhood tucked within the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge.

These images, about a dozen of which are included in the exhibition, make no effort to disguise the hardships experienced by the blacks, Jews and European Gypsies who made the area their home. But in almost every case the emphasis is on community rather than on misery, on a hard-won emotional amplitude rather than on oppression.

In one picture, neighborhood women with strollers gather to chat outside a rubble-strewn lot; in another, a little girl plays alone on a swing; in a third, Gypsy children sit on a stoop absorbed in a card game. The vignettes are straightforward, but each is warmed by suggestive details. Behind the women a line of immaculate white laundry hangs like a row of guardian angels; the high trajectory of the swinging girl is echoed in the soaring lines of the bridge behind her, and the faces of the children playing cards seem gilded, even in black and white, by late-day sunlight.

A few years later, Mr. Rosenblum was in Europe. As a photographer with the United States Army during World War II, he recorded thelanding in Normandy in 1944, and was the first Allied photographer to enter the concentration camp at Dachau after its liberation. When the war was over he stayed in Europe to work for the Unitarian Service Committee photographing Spanish Civil War refugees living in southern France.

A few of his combat pictures are in the show, but they are outnumbered by images of civilians — mourners at a military funeral in France, flag-waving crowds on fire escapes at a New York block party, Spanish children in hospitals and camps. In all these photographs, ordinary people are seen reacting, often with unself-conscious stoicism, to the forces shaping their destinies.

Such influences are given a particularly incisive visual embodiment in the ”Spanish Refugee” series, which is unique, at least in the Queens College show, for being shot almost entirely indoors. Picture after picture has a shut-in, humid, underground look, with faces and figures seeming to loom out of semidarkness into the camera’s eye.

In contrast to these ashen, claustrophobic images, those he produced a few years later of fishing villages in the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec are buoyant with light and air. Nature is the real subject here, seen in sweeps of sea and sky, and a hardscrabble coastal landscape shared by people and animals.

Yet, despite dramatic differences in atmosphere and subject, the two series have essential elements in common, as seen in a simple comparison. A Spanish woman sitting erect with her grandchild in her lap in a refugee camp in France and an elderly French Canadian widow staring, alert as a bird, straight into the camera, may have lived an ocean apart, but they are both, in the photographer’s eye, unassuming cultural emblems of endurance.

Almost a decade later, Mr. Rosenblum worked again outside the United States when, on a sabbatical from his job at Brooklyn College (where taught photography from 1947 to 1986) he traveled to Haiti. He stayed there for 10 months, immersing himself in the spirit of the place, a practice he had followed since the ”Pitt Street” series.

The show offers 13 of his 90 some pictures from Haiti. And whether they are shots of a domestic altar in a thatch-roof house, an exhausted woman leaning against a veranda pole or the island landscape, almost preposterously gorgeous with its lush hills and piled-up clouds, the tone is one of restrained, level-eyed observation, never prosaic or overtly poetic but somewhere in between.

The same is true of his several New York City series, among them one made in the neighborhood around 105th Street in East Harlem in 1952 and another in the South Bronx in 1980. A handful of the East Harlem images — three confident young men posed before a graffiti-covered wall, a child playing hopscotch in the street, a girl smiling shyly from an open window — are much-exhibited classics. The Bronx pictures, taken nearly 30 years later, are tougher, jumpier, more varied, less lyrical, but every bit as engaged and, like all of this artist’s work, determinedly hopeful.

Mr. Rosenblum has said that he chose East Harlem as a subject in the 1950’s because he was convinced of the vital role that the growing Latino population would play in the country’s future. And he chose to spend time in the South Bronx in 1980 because he felt that its community, then at the nadir of its economic fortunes, was being unjustly blamed for its travails.

That he called upon art as a persuasive means of stating his convictions is admirable. That the art he created is one of formal beauty and expressive power and tenderness will be apparent to anyone visiting the Queens College show. It is worth noting, incidently, that on Monday, Mr. Rosenblum, along with his wife, the photo-historian Naomi Rosenblum, will be given a lifetime achievement award by the International Center of Photography. The honor is richly deserved.

”Walter Rosenblum, Photographs: A Retrospective Exhibition” remains at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Paul Klapper Hall, Queens College, Flushing, through May 28.

Photos: Walter Rosenblum’s ”Hopscotch” (1952), from a retrospective of his photographs at Queens College. (Walter Rosenblum); Gilded faces: Large detail of ”Gypsy Children Playing Cards” (1938), from Walter Rosenblum’s ”Pitt Street” series, shot when he was 19. (Walter Rosenblum)

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/01/arts/photography-review-tender-witness-to-the-togetherness-of-people-in-want.html