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243 Bob Adelman A child of Jewish immigrants, Bob Adelman was born on October 30, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in nearby Rockaway. His father, an amateur photographer, taught him how to use a darkroom and first piqued his interest in photography. “My father was a disciplined craftsman ,” Adelman said. “I learned precision from him. But all photographers originally get hooked on the magic—the shazam—of the way a blank piece of paper all of a sudden takes on an image.” Adelman earned an undergraduate degree from Rutgers University, where he majored in philosophy with a focus on aesthetics. For a brief time, he entertained the notion of becoming a lawyer, but was disillusioned “that the law had so little to do with justice.” In the late 1950s, he became an assistant to commercial photographers, and then apprenticed with Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary Russian art director and graphic designer who taught photographers Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus. “Brodovich was a great influence,” Adelman noted. “His aesthetics were simple—astonish me! Show me something I haven’t seen before.” In the early 1960s, Adelman began taking social documentary photographs. “Like everyone else in the country,” he said, “I had the idea that segregation was wrong. The courts had ruled it was illegal in schools, but it didn’t do much good. The country was paralyzed. But when the students in the South began their sit-ins, I though that was an effective way to make change.” Through friends, Adelman got in touch with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and photographed their efforts to desegregate restaurants and bus terminals on Route 40, between New York and Washington DC. Developing a long-term connection with CORE, Adelman wound up photographing such critical movement events as the 1963 March on Washington and SCLC’s Project C in Birmingham, where he took his dramatic images of protestors being fire-hosed. “Lillian Smith once said to me,” Adelman explained, “don’t watch the whites. Whatever they are doing they’ve been doing for the last hundred years. Watch what the blacks are doing. They’re taking their bodies to where they were not supposed to be. My Birmingham pictures were unique because that was my 244 focus. And the fire hoses were brutal. They ripped the bark from trees. But rather than being pushed around by them, the people held onto one another and were able to resist them. And, eventually, they stopped hosing them.” In the ensuing years, the major magazines discovered Adelman’s movement images, and he wound up photographing cover stories for Esquire, Time, People, Life, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Paris Match. He has photographed or written more than a dozen books, including Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Struggle for Civil Rights. His photographs have been exhibited at the Smithsonian , the American Federation of Art, and several other institutions. They also are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. ...

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