A Legacy
by Gerald Feldman
Because the history of photography, as a medium of artistic expression, has been just a little over a century, the ability to permanently fix an image of the outer world projected through a lens onto a stable surface has not been much longer than that. The ability to see the layers cultural invention, exploration, so distinctly pronounced, is no more evident than in the work of Robert Bianchi.
Born and raised in mid-twentieth century New York City, at an existential intersection in which the acceptance of photography as true art, worthy of serious study (Bianchi holds an MFA from Brooklyn College) met with the time when the earliest artists pioneered the photographic medium as a means of artistic expression, were not only living practitioners, but were still young enough, fit enough, to be available as teachers and mentors when Bianchi reached maturity. (Imagine a twentieth century painter being able to have personal access to Leonardo or Raphael.)
Dig down, to a stratum in Bianchi’s youth where he receives personal instruction from no less a figure than Philllipe Halsman (Born in 1906, barely crossing the threshold from the 19th to the twentieth centuries). Emigrated from Riga to become one of just a few early recognized masters of portrait photography (portfolio of iconic images of masters in other fields in their time – Dali, Einstein, Brando, young John Kennedy) Halsman’s hallmark wit to create startlingly surreal juxtapositions, achieved at times by means of early analog special effects technology of multiple exposures and composite printing is evidenced in Bianchi’s digital (truly evolutionary) adaptation of this technology to create sublimely poetic, deeply textured and densely detailed imagery that would have been impossible to produce in Halsman’s time.
At another level we brush away more of the mound to uncover Bianchi’s adaptation of another early analog technique. Discovered and named “solarization” by Man Ray (presumably by accident) surrealist photographer, painter and film maker Man Ray, born in Philadelphia in 1890 (the same century in which just decades before, fixing and preserving a photographic image to a solid substrate had first become possible) and raised in Brooklyn (Emmanuel Ratnitsky), which he called “solarization.”
Solarization was a darkroom technique that produced a photographic print, which oddly contained both positive and negative areas from a conventional photographic negative. Achieved by exposing the normally developing print to a sudden burst of bright light. Unsettling and ghostly it demonstrated the surrealists’ affinity for the irrational. Contradictions. The absurd…
In pursuit of an aesthetic and personal goal of closing the gap between the observed and the observer, seen and unseen, the revealed and the hidden, Bianchi applied his own variation of the original darkroom technique with Polaroid film to hasten successful results to this trial and error process.
“I often photographed the subject naked… I was not photographing the person, but rather a state of being. The soul is much more elusive than the body… I was looking for secrets and untold stories within people, while simultaneously exploring myself… The thought that we are all both positive and negative is what drove me to solarize the negative… Can something hidden be revealed within the hidden places? …I would say, ‘So now it is time to stop hiding.’ And we would start.”
That Bianchi has known success in his pursuit over his long career evidenced in the exhibits and permanent collections.
He has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. His work is exhibited and collected by museums around the world. The Museum of the City of New York purchased twenty-eight of his West Side Highway series, and his work is also part of the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Chrysler Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Museum de l’Eysee, Lausanne, Switzerland. Robert Bianchi was the first artist working in photography to be given a one-person exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, highly acclaimed in the New York Times. His work has been exhibited and toured by the Kinsey Institute and recently shown at the Leslie Lohman Gallery in New York City.
But wait. There is another untold story yet to be unearthed. Acknowledged. Rescued from the past. Restored to memory. And finally told.
It is the story of a legacy. A legacy bequeathed by a movement. A movement that formed an organization of like-minded souls in pursuit of a common goal. Together, with Talmudic dedication, they sought to distill from disparate experiences and interests, a meaning, a purpose and a method that others could follow.
The Photo League was founded at the height of the Great Depression when multitudes sought a (rescue) reprieve from (to physical and spiritual impoverishment) – the antidote to alienation and despair.
And because the League convened in a country with pluralism as its creed, in New York City, where cross-cultural commerce and intellectual intercourse (was its common coin) were the rule, the League eschewed the provincial, was naturally cosmopolitan and ecumenical in its tolerance of the broadest swath of ideas to be debated and methods to be explored, from which truth could be refined. (Therefore, one can easily demonstrate that the common notion that the League championed only documentary works of social significance – though it was dominant, as a result of a certain political orientation – is a mistake, many were of the avant garde, purely aesthetic, even abstract.)
Beginning with Paul Strand, one of the League’s original founders, to its members, associates and teachers, the League attracted the best from America and beyond. Among the names, still remembered with reverence: W. Eugene Smith, Richard Avedon, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Ansel Adams, Robert Capa remain familiar as household words to those with any serious intellectual or creative investment in the photographic enterprise. At its height the league had branched out to multiple locations throughout the city, to become a kind of American “School of Athens,” for the study and pursuit of the photographic arts.
But just a few years after the end of WWII the League’s nearly two decade run was coming to an end. It disbanded in 1951, having been named a “subversive” organization by the newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee represented the country’s unapologetic rightward swing from victor in the war against fascism, to a tacit embrace of fascist principles. Crushing, through blacklists and imprisonment, those who had been unlucky enough in youth to have signed a pledge, joined a group, or supported a cause for social justice and responsibility. Or those with some pride and personal integrity who refused to conform, who could not snap to attention, straighten up and fly right.
(Of course the League was an easy target, as artists are generally non-conformists, the league was admittedly left-leaning at a time that leaned right, and having grown out the pressing needs of the Great Depression, of course, a number were communists – if not in active participation in a cell, at least in conscience and principle.)
What was left when the classes ceased, the exhibits cancelled, the debates silenced and the workshops dismantled?
A legacy
All the members, students, teachers, supporters and friends did not just disappear. They went to ground. They continued to photograph and create. To debate, teach, learn and disseminate.
And Robert Bianchi, among others of his generation that came after the League, was a beneficiary.
What else do you call it when as Bianchi recounts. “I studied for a year with an ‘ash-can’ photographer, Lou Bernstein. Also, at Brooklyn College, where I received my MFA, I studied with Walter Rosenblum.”
Lou Bernstein and Walter Rosenblum are not just two insignificant names of anonymous instructors. They were both original members of the Photo League. Men of significant accomplishment with much to impart to those who’d follow.
Lou Bernstein, along with having participated in nearly seventy exhibitions over the course of his long life, taught photographic workshops for over thirty years. Collections of his work are included at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, New York’s International Center of Photography, the Jewish Museum (also in New York), and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. Two of his photographs were included in Edward Steichen’s monumental exhibit, The Family of Man
Walter Rosenblum was a lifelong friend and protégé of League founder Paul Strand. He served as a combat photographer during World War II and photographed the D-Day landing at Normandy alongside fellow photographer Robert Capa (who’d taught at the League after the war), Together they captured some of the most iconic images of the invasion (which are exhibited globally to this day). Winner of the Silver Star, among other honors and citations, including the Purple Heart and Bronze Star, Rosenblum was among the most highly decorated combat photographers of the war. He taught at Brooklyn College for forty years, where one of his students was Robert Bianchi.
And how far can you say the legacy has reached when Robert Capa gave this blunt advice to photographers dissatisfied with his work: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” (By which he seems to imply that caution and self-preservation stand in the way of capturing truth.)
How far and how deep the legacy has reached when you hear the meaning of these words echoed in Robert Bianchi’s efforts to close the distance and capture “a state of being. The soul is much more elusive than the body… I was looking for secrets and untold stories within people, while simultaneously exploring myself… Can something hidden be revealed within the hidden places?… I would say, ‘So now it is time to stop hiding.’ And we would start.”
This exhibit was compiled by Gerald Feldman for Pamela Goldman, Curator and Founder of Museum Mile Contemporary, a non-profit institution.
To send a message to the artists or the administration click the link: https://www.museummilecontemporary.org
The artist’s website: https://www.robertbianchiphotography.com
Next week, we shall publish the translation into Italian of the article and more photos by Robert Bianchi
Friday, February 13, 2026
On the cover: a portrait of the artist; in the article: all images, courtesy by the artist © Robert Bianchi (all rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited)
