Bob Adelman, 85, photographer who covered OBITUARY BY MARY REINHOLZ
N
oted photojournalist Bob Adelman, a freelancer deeply involved in the early civil rights movement who shot an iconic photo of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and went on to document a wide swath of American society, died March 19 at his home in Miami Beach. He was 85 and had relocated to South Florida from Manhattan nearly 20 years ago. In addition to covering the civil rights movement, Adelman’s subjects ranged from the world of high-concept art to the underground scene of hustlers and sex clubs in Downtown New York. Early news reports touched off suspicions of foul play when police cordoned off his house as a crime scene after a friend found him alone with a head wound and unresponsive. But Darren J. Caprara, director of operations at the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Department, told The Villager that Adelman suffered a heart attack “and then injured his head when he fell.” He attributed his death to hypertensive and arteriosclerotic heart disease. The twice-divorced roving lensman, a Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European immigrants who grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, during the Great Depression and graduated from Stuyvesant High School, was also a prolific book producer. He published at least 75 books on diverse subjects, including the bawdy “Tijuana Bibles,” and also put together books with the Life magazine imprint. His photographs have been collected in major museums, among them the Smithsonian and the Museum of Modern Art. Adelman, who studied law at Harvard University and held a master’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University, was buried March 23 at Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Lindenhurst, Long Island. Survivors include his daughter Samantha Joy Reay, by his first wife, Trudy Vine; a sister, Delores Feldman; and three grandchildren. Several colleagues and cronies said Adelman was working up until the time he died. “He was here in New York, staying at the Waldorf, just a few weeks ago and talking about his print of Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Greene Street Mural,’ ” a 96-foot-long masterwork that Adelman had a photographed at Leo Castelli’s Soho gallery in 1984, said James Cavello, a founder and owner of the Westwood art gallery at 568 Broadway at Prince St., who attended Adelman’s graveside funeral.
14
March 31, 2016
PHOTO © DAN BUDNIK
In a probably never-before-published photo, Bob Adelman with marchers in Lowndes County on March 24, 1965, during the Selma-toMontgomery march.
PHOTO © BOB ADELMAN
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial.
“He photographed all the great artists, the giants of the art world” — including Andy Warhol and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett — noted Cavello, who curated a 2008 exhibition of Adelman’s civil rights photos at Westwood. “He was in the belly of the beast, in the middle of what was going on. Whether it was civil rights or gay rights, Bob was there. He was amazing. How many individuals do you know who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King? He was a white Jewish photographer and he also photographed Malcolm X.” Asked what it was like to work with Adelman, Cavello laughed and said, “Like most photographers, he was difficult. But he was a true artist with great integrity.” Cavello plans to host a memorial for Adelman after Westwood Gallery moves to 262 Bowery in June. Adelman’s 72-inch print of Lichtenstein’s “Greene Street Mural” will be on display, said the gallery’s co-owner, Margarite Almeida. There are reports of a memorial being planned for Adelman at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which appointed him as a consulting photographer and lecturer in August 2014. He began a series of four lectures there, one on his book “Andy Warhol’s First Fifteen Minutes” during the Library’s National Book Festival. Stephen Watt, Adelman’s manager at his Miami Beach archives, said his late boss was on schedule to do his “last” talk for the library on Bastille Day, July 14. Watt described Adelman as “one of a kind, much larger than life,” noting his published books included one on Soviet military power and another on the Bill of Rights, with Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York for 23 years. By many accounts, Adelman was a driven and complicated man who didn’t drink or smoke but who struggled for years with his weight. He had a mischievous sense of humor and photographed his “shrinking” size in nude photos he took for Esquire magazine. He once said in an interview: “When I photographed, I was intent on telling the truth as best I saw it and then to help in doing something about it.” Famed novelist Ann Beattie, who was a friend and collaborator with Adelman since 1981 when she lived in Chelsea, said in an e-mail that the quirky photographer was “not an easy person, but he was nevertheless his own person, and he was amazingly hard working, up until the day he died, and he always aspired to a more equitable balance of power. His convictions about soADELMAN continued on p. 15 TheVillager.com