Adelman has moved beyond the familiar clichés of most documentary photography into that rare sphere wherein technical ability and social vision combine to create a work of art.
- Ralph Ellison
Photographer Bob Adelman (1930-2016) captured historic and artistic photographs for sixty years. His extraordinary visual documentation covered subjects from the civil rights movement, the New York art scene, urban culture, social essays, politics, music, the South, and revealing portraits of personalities.
An internationally-recognized photojournalist, Bob Adelman worked for LIFE, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, TIME, Esquire, Vanity Fair, London's Sunday Times Magazine, Paris Match, and other major publications. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Grantee. He is primarily known for his photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when he volunteered his services as a photographer to the Congress of Racial Equality and captured the transformative events that re-shaped modern American history.
Adelman’s images were exhibited worldwide during his lifetime, in institutions including: Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, Getty Museum, High Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and many others. Acquired by the Library of Congress in 2017, the Adelman archive is regarded as the foremost documentation of crucial periods in modern US history.