A special photographic exhibition, “Scenes of Bravery and Determination: Walter Rosenblum’s Homage to the Refugees of the Spanish Civil War,” is currently on display at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, located at 53 Washington Square South, through May, 2009. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m. For further information, call 212.998.3650 or visit www.nyu.edu/kjc.
In the fall of 1946, the New York photographer Walter Rosenblum, a student and friend of Paul Strand and Lewis Hine, traveled to Toulouse, France, to record the relief work being undertaken by the Unitarian Service Committee for the thousands of Spanish refugees living in camps since the end of the Spanish Civil War, seven years earlier. He came back with a series of haunting portraits, 25 of which are part of this exhibition at NYU. This is the first time that this large a set from the series is being shown in the United States. “I had expected to find dejected and tired people,” Rosenblum later wrote, “but instead discovered bravery and determination.”
Rosenblum, who died in 2006, spent over 60 years as a photographer. He was a combat photographer during World War II, landing on a Normandy beach on D-Day morning. One of the most decorated photographers of World War II, he shot the first motion picture coverage of the Dachau concentration camp. He also had an extensive teaching career, beginning at Brooklyn College in 1947, where he taught until his retirement in 1986.
This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and NYU’s Tamiment Library, with special thanks to the Rosenblum family.