Longtime Norfolk summer resident Naomi Rosenblum, the author of seminal works on the history of photography, died peacefully at home in New York City at the age of 96, on Feb. 19, 2021. Her work over the course of 30 years shaped the understanding of the significance of photography as a fine art form. Rosenblum’s books, articles, lectures and seminars—in Europe, South America, throughout the United States and China—brought expanded scholarship and recognition to the field. 

She married Walter Rosenblum in 1949; from 1952 to 1976 he taught photography at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, and the couple was a fixture of the Norfolk cultural scene every summer until his death in 2006. Rosenblum continued summering in Norfolk until 2019, and every day, rain or shine, headed to Tobey Pond to swim. She will be remembered by her many friends in town as a generous host, excellent chef and superb conversationalist.

Rosenblum held adjunct professorships of art history at Brooklyn College, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Tisch has honored her with a student scholarship in her name. She was also recognized for her international curatorial work, including exhibitions of the photographs of Paul Strand and other noted photographers. In 1980, an exhibition featuring the work of Lewis Hine that she had curated for the Brooklyn Museum became the first photographic exhibition to travel from an American museum to China. Her “World History of Photography” is recognized as a landmark scholarly text. Following publication of her “History of Women Photographers,” Rosenblum co-curated an exhibition on women photographers that opened at the New York Public Library in 1996 and toured museums across the United States. In 2019, she turned her attention to Norfolk and contributed the introduction to “A Remarkable Legacy: The Photographs of Marie Hartig Kendall,” published by the Norfolk Historical Society.

In 1998, Rosenblum and her husband, Walter, a decorated World War II army combat cameraman and well-known photographer and professor, received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2020, Aperture Foundation, the leading photographic publishing foundation and center for photography, honored her for her contribution to the field of photographic history. 

Naomi Rosenblum and her sister, Vera, a Caldecott Award-winning children’s book writer and illustrator, grew up in a Russian immigrant household, first in Los Angeles and then in the Bronx, that was immersed in the political and cultural movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Though of limited means, her parents enrolled the sisters in free art classes at settlement houses. Rosenblum attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, received her B.A. from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center.

She is survived by her daughters, Lisa Rosenblum, an attorney, former commissioner of the New York State Public Service Commission and retired corporate executive, and her partner Nina Celebic; and Nina Rosenblum, an Academy Award-nominated documentary producer and director, and her husband David Allentuck. Donations may be made in Rosenblum’s memory to Citymeals on Wheels (www.citymeals.org).