Bob Adelman helped us see
I met the photographer Bob Adelman for the first time many years ago in Barbados. We’d rented a house on the beach, on the quieter Caribbean side of the island where there was sand, not the high cliffs of the Atlantic side, and the waves were smaller. The “we” included the writer Ann Beattie; her husband, Lincoln Perry; and myself. And then Bob came down to stay for a few days. He was loud and funny and kind of a big loping galoot who would punctuate every statement with a kind of braying “Whaaat?” as if it were a question.
We drove around the island
in a tinny, topless contraption called a Mini- Moke, Lincoln at the wheel, the rest of us cowering as he swerved around blind corners winding through tall sugarcane on roads too narrow for one car, much less two. At one point, we wanted to get to the highest point on the island and drove and drove, and the land rose and then the road seemed to evaporate into a grassy field, but we kept driving as if it was still there.
It occurred to me that we were headed for a cliff. I quietly advised Lincoln of that fact. Lincoln kept driving, the brittle grass brushing the sides of the vehicle. I advised again, a bit more forcefully. Lincoln kept driving. Finally I shouted, “Lincoln, stop the car,” within a few feet of a cliff. Adelman was howling with laughter.
Each night we went to a bamboo beach bar and drank too many rum punches, which turned to sugar in our systems and kept us awake through the night. We were on the first floor of a two- story duplex, a bit down the beach from the posh, pink Sandy Lane resort. Every night, dinner consisted of flying fish prepared in endlessly different ways by a local woman named Josephine. There were British people upstairs who ignored us until the day they left and then expressed the hope that they would never set eyes on us again.
On Easter morning, piled into the Mini- Moke, we happened upon the smallest church in the world, a building less than the size of a single room, but painted a wild array of colors. And standing in front was a small Bajan choir, joyfully singing the hymn “He Didn’t Have to Do It ( But He Did).” Bob bounced from the Mini- Moke and walked toward the tiny church, his camera snapping away, getting closer and closer until the lens was almost in the faces of the singers.
Bob lost a whole bunch of weight at some point and re- corded his shrinking progress in a series of self- photographed nudes, rather in the fashion of Eadweard Muybridge.
Over a long career, Bob’s subjects ranged from Edie Sedgwick to Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, Samuel Beckett and the artist Roy Lichtenstein.
But his greatest achievement as a photographer came during an important moment in American history, the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He was at the Lincoln Memorial only a few feet away from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he spoke of his dream of racial harmony; he was at the funeral of Malcolm X; he was at the lunch counters and sit- ins; and he was at Selma.
Bob was motivated by art, but he was perhaps even more driven to bear witness to injustice through his photography. His work is exquisite, defined by light and passion, brilliant, vivid, as immediate as this moment, filled with yearning and tears and hope.
Bob and I stayed in touch long after Barbados. He’d send me copies of books he had completed, including his books on King and the civil rights movement, and the book he created with the great John Loengard documenting the classic photography of Life magazine.
One of Bob’s most personal books, I believe, was “Carver Country,” created with Tess Gallagher and documenting the places in Washington state frequented by the late Raymond Carver. I have that one, too. It made such an impression on me that to this day, whenever I reread a Carver story, one of the images from Bob’s book slips quietly into my consciousness.
Bob died Saturday, March 19, in Miami at 85. He’d been living in Florida for many years, but we stayed in touch, mostly through exchanged notes and Christmas cards. In the early years, we talked about all of us meeting up again in Barbados, on the quiet side of the island. After a while, our correspondence became less geographically specific, as those kinds of exchanges will.
Bob was a singular, almost Rabelaisian character. He owned every room he ever walked into. His loss as an artist, a photojournalist and as a man is incalculable. Fortunately, what he saw, what he captured through his camera, is always with us, as alive as if it were shot only yesterday.
Of course, when we look at Bob’s photographs of Selma, the sit- ins, the “I Have a Dream” speech, we see them in their original context. But the genius of Bob’s work is how those extraordinary images speak to the present day across all the years and miles. Much of that is because great art is timeless. But much of it is also because their subject matter, for Bob, wasn’t just of the moment, but of ongoing history. We cannot look at Bob’s photographs and think, “How far we’ve come.” Instead, we look at them and read their message that injustice is not easily thwarted. Bob Adelman’s art tells stories that travel well beyond the moment.