'History was getting lost.' She found it.

By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences

Her parents were immigrants. She grew up without a lot of money. Naomi Rosenblum developed an appreciation for art, specifically photography, with a clear vision of the “blind spots” in our society. That discernment allowed her to combine visual and intellectual criticism with the cultures, races, ideologies, and perspectives that fully embody the history of photography.

The visual world owes a debt to Rosenblum, pictured above, who died Feb. 20 at age 96. So says her former classmate and longtime NYU colleague, Shelley Rice, a historian and critic.

Already the author of a definitive history of photography, “Dr. Rosenblum became more aware of another blind spot: the untold, often suppressed, stories of women’s contributions to our field,” Rice wrote to me.

Rosenblum was succinct in her reason for writing a new book to an interviewer in 1997: “History was getting lost.”

Her History of Women Photographers provided the base for a dialogue that keeps flourishing, Rice notes. Rosenblum brought together photographers, arranged exhibitions and collaborations worldwide, and lectured on women photographers. She was “a strong believer in knowledge and intellectual discourse and she read voraciously up until her final days,” her daughter, film director Nina Rosenblum, tells us.

Many of the photographers Rosenblum championed had never before been recognized for their work; others had faded to obscurity. Some, like Carrie Mae Weems and Susan Meiselas, were emerging. (Pictured below left, Rosenblum featured a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait of Alice Liddell, who as a child was a muse for Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll; below right, Ruth Orkin’s “Jinx in Beads,” from Florence, Italy.)

Rosenblum also examined Nat Geo. In her introduction to our 2000 book, Women Photographers at National Geographic, she singled out a 1967 photograph in our archives inscribed “greatest photographic team in the world” that showed 25 coat-and-tie-suited men surrounding the desk of then-Editor Melville Bell Grosvenor. The image suggested, Rosenblum wrote, that “the universal language of the photograph upon which this publication (and others) depended was solely a contribution of the male eye and mind.” (Since then, things have changed around here.)

Rice summed up Rosenblum’s greatest contribution this way: She “spent her life building a big tent, filling it with all of us, and calling it the history of photography. We are grateful for her energy, her fairness, her diligence and primarily (for this is foundational) her inclusive love.”

Above, Rosenblum featured a pioneering postwar British photojournalist, Grace Robertson, who took this image at the Italia Conti school for aspiring actors in 1952. Some of Robertson’s early work was credited to a male pseudonym. When Rosenblum featured her, Robertson had left the field to become an elementary school teacher. Five years later, she was appointed to the Order of the British Empire for her photographic work. Robertson died in January at age 90.

Rosenblum’s promotion of women photographers didn’t stop with her book. In 1996, Rosenblum raised the profile of Oregon photographer Lily E. White, who had died in 1944. She selected this photograph for a touring exhibition of more than 200 women photographers. In “Twilight on the Columbia—Castle Rock in the Distance,” White, hailed at the time by Alfred Stieglitz, depicts a person in a rowboat on the Columbia River in about 1902. Seven years later, White gave up photography, according to the Oregon History Project.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

1,000 words: In the upper left of this image, downtown Austin gleamed. In the foreground, it was dark, representing the uneven energy distribution during widespread outages in Texas during a record cold snap. The video series Reading The Pictures discusses Tamir Kaklifa’s image—and how it is read right-to-left, ending with two people huddling in a car trying to charge a cellphone and stay warm.

R.I.P. Benedict J. Fernandez: The path-breaking “photo-anthropologist,” who captured the persona of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the fervor of protest movements, later taught kids of all economic backgrounds—and mentored a generation of professional photographers. Fernandez, who had had undiagnosed dyslexia as a kid, said photography wasn’t just for fun; it was to document important things that happen. His students at his free workshops included a future Pulitzer-winning photographer, Angel Franco. Franco told Nat Geo’s David Beard that Fernandez had also opened a photo workshop in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Fernandez died on Jan. 31 of heart ailments, the New York Times reports. He was 84.

What Ebony meant to Black photography: Which publication best showed the extraordinary progress that many Black Americans made during the 20th century—and beyond? A new photo book makes the case for Ebony magazine. “Rather than appropriate white culture, Ebony offered an inside view into a striving Black bourgeois through a series of photo essays and features on celebrities and current events,” blind-magazine.com wrote. “For 75 years, Ebony was the forerunner of Black American culture, chronicling the times, and offering a visual history of the nation from segregation through Civil Rights, and beyond.” See the cover images.

Picturing harp seals: Photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Jennifer Hayes grew up on the ice. On assignment, she “chased the ice” on a boat off eastern Canada, searching for these seals, who depend upon it. Drinking Diet Coke after Diet Coke, she searched for three days, she tells the Snap Judgment podcast. At dusk on the third day, she began to hear the cries of seal pups, wailing like humans. At dawn, she checked her gear, ready to work. See her images.

INSTAGRAM OF THE DAY

Giraffe rescue: Rising water turned a peninsula on Kenya’s Lake Baringo into an island in December, trapping two giraffes. Photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Ami Vitale captured the rescue of the giraffes in a makeshift raft to a conservancy (above). Today fewer than 3,000 Rothschild’s giraffes are left in Africa, with about 800 in Kenya. “The hope is that this is just the first step of reintroducing these giraffes back to their historical home across the Western Rift Valley, hopefully over the next 20-30 years,” explains David O’Connor, president of @savegiraffesnow, who helped orchestrate this move. (Like this image? If so, you’re not alone. So have more than 484,000 readers on our Instagram page.)

IN A FEW WORDS

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THE LAST GLIMPSE

Tsunami: 10 years ago Thursday, a tsunami struck Japan’s eastern coast after an earthquake. The toll: nearly 16,000 people—and $200 billion in damages. Photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg showed how the disaster roiled the lives of the survivors. In the fishing village of Otsuchi, red flags marked where the bodies were found. “Other than the flags, there are no colors left here,” he told Nat Geo. (Above, the color palette from a waterlogged family photo album inspired Alejandro to gather survivors at the ruined port—and to use similar photo tinting in postproduction.)

SEE THE PHOTOS