Description
Born and educated in California, Margo’s early training with Bay Area Figurative Painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff gave her a keen sense of composition. Later her study with photographer Bud Lee encouraged her sympathetic and sometimes quirky responsiveness to humanity. The selections included here, rather than being arranged in any thematic order, are sequenced in a much more emotional or, perhaps, an intuitive way. Most of the images are black and white, but color photos appear where they seemed to belong. There are pictures of family, friends, landscapes, animals, musicians, artists, and more. Many of her photographs over the years came from collaborative work with her husband, artist and folklorist Art Rosenbaum, documenting traditional music: mountain fiddlers, country blues men and women, Scottish ballad singers. Margo’s travels and years in art circles have offered subjects for her sympathetic and keen eye: we see New York subway riders and Egyptian Coptic kids along with folk musicians Elizabeth Cotten, Pete Seeger, Doc and Lucy Barnes, and famous artists and writers like Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel, and James Baldwin.
The book includes a perceptive introduction by photographer, folklorist, and curator Fred Fussell.
Margo Newmark Rosenbaum lives and works in Athens, Georgia.
This is a gorgeous and remarkable book; the images span over fifty years yet the eye behind them remains constant; the juxtapositions are revelatory and unpredictable. Margo has given us a feast of wise beauty and luminous humanity.Judith McWillie
Also available as Digital Download and Softback
Introduction
She Sees…
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. – ROBERT HENRI, The Art Spirit
Margo Rosenbaum possesses a remarkable propensity for seeing. She seeks out and peers deeply into the unusual. To see in the way that she does requires an applaudable sensitivity. It takes curiosity, and it takes time. It takes vision and, most importantly, it takes heart.
When Margo Rosenbaum sees something notable, she responds. And then, through her imagery, she shares what she has seen. Her images variously contain mystery, humor, empathy, truth, beauty, tragedy, sadness, happiness, joy, and sorrow.
Even though her initial art training was as a painter (which she continues) Margo Rosenbaum shares her artistic vision primarily through the medium of photography. Initially she studied painting under the tutelage of artists Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Frank Lobdell at The San Francisco Art Institute, Bay Area Figurative Painters, who stressed composition as fundamental. Later she studied photography with Bud Lee in the photography department at the University of Iowa Journalism School. It was actually Lee who first recognized the unusual and distinctive way Margo encounters subject matter and encouraged her to delve deeper into learning the craft of photography. And she has.
Margo has her camera by her side most times. Whether visiting with friends, walking along country roadways, riding city subways, attending art events or music venues, or simply traveling the world’s highways and airways, she finds and documents the notable subject matter that she encounters. Margo’s interest in the traditional folk culture of the South forms a major component of her work.
A musician herself, she captures images of singers and musicians with a particular sensitivity that resonates from her own proclivity for playing music. She has a fellow musician’s knack for seeing and capturing the essence of another musician’s soulfulness.
Interestingly, it was their shared interest in playing traditional music that first brought Margo Newmark and Art Rosenbaum together years ago at a gathering of mutual friends in New York City. And since they married in 1966, Margo has worked side-by-side with her husband on numerous music-based projects. In collaborations with Art and on her own Margo has documented the work, music, and lives of some of our nation’s greatest traditional musicians as well as many of its most notable visual artists and writers, whether famous or obscure. Among her subjects have been the Reverend Howard Finster, The McIntosh County Shouters, Pete Seeger, Elizabeth Cotten, Philip Guston, Willem DeKooning, Alice Neel, Bill Monroe, John Hartford, John Irving, Robert Wilson, Doc and Lucy Barnes, and many others. Working together, Art and Margo have produced a handful of wonderful books and recording projects that document traditional American music including the Grammy award winning box set The Art of Field Recording, Vol I.
Margo’s photography was widely exhibited in the touring exhibition titled Folk Visions and Voices, and has been an integral component in several books authored by Art Rosenbaum including Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia; Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition on the Coast of Georgia; and The Mary Lomax Ballad Book: America’s Great 21st Century Ballad Singer.
A selection of Margo’s photographs of the Gullah-Geechee ring shout tradition on coastal Georgia were featured in a traveling show, Shout!, that was organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, and others of her images from that region are part of two Smithsonian Folkways recording projects which document the McIntosh County Shouters.
Her photographs of musicians and other subjects have been widely exhibited and have appeared in print in The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Old-Time Herald. She was a featured photographer in The Georgia Review. Her photographic work was included in the exhibition Great Photographs! at the Luise Ross Gallery in New York. Her photographic work is archived in the University of Georgia Special Collections Library, and many of her prints are held in private collections.
The particular selection of Margo Rosenbaum’s photographs that are offered here in this book comprise an essential sampler of her vision as a photographic artist – a sort of one-person exhibition by an artist who has spent a lifetime exploring the visible world in her own distinctive way.
The selection included here, rather than being arranged in any thematic order, is sequenced in a much more emotional or, perhaps, an intuitive way. There are pictures of family, friends, landscapes, animals, musicians, travelers, artists, and more. These images are juxtaposed in ways that emote Margo’s distinctive sensitivity to color, tonality, subject, and form. Although the majority of the images are in black and white, some have been rendered in color. Color in her photos is used to great effect, especially when its use lends itself to the creation of a desired mood or to enhance the ultimate definition of a subject.
In total, this book offers a window that reveals the essence of what Margo Rosenbaum sees, and how she responds to what she sees – with empathy, with vision, with an artful eye, and with heart.
Fred C. Fussell
Columbus, Georgia
