Naomi Rosenblum, Historian of Photography, Dies at 96
Her seminal works brought scholarship to the field and helped develop appreciation for it as a creative art form.
The historian Naomi Rosenblum in an undated photo. Her work helped bring scholarship and recognition to photography as a creative art form.Credit.Paul Strand/Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation
March 5, 2021
Naomi Rosenblum, who wrote about the history of photography and helped elevate it as an art form, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Long Island City, Queens. She was 96.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her family said.
Dr. Rosenblum was the author of seminal works that helped bring scholarship and recognition to photography as a creative art form after practitioners, notably Alfred Stieglitz, had revolutionized the field by defying the conventions of subject matter and composition creating images in the rain and snow, for example, or of a pattern that the sea cut in the sand.
An artist’s rendering shows the early primate species known as Purgatorius mckeeveri. (Andrey Atuchin Illustration via Burke Museum)
The shapes of fossilized teeth from 65.9 million-year-old, squirrel-like creatures suggest that the branch of the tree of life that gave rise to us humans and other primates flowered while dinosaurs still walked the earth.
That’s the claim coming from a team of 10 researchers across the U.S., including biologists at Seattle’s Burke Museum and the University of Washington.
In a study published by Royal Society Open Science, the team lays out evidence that an ancient group of primates known as plesiadapiforms must have emerged before the mass-extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. (Technically, modern-day birds are considered the descendants of dinosaurs, but that’s another story.)
A Memorial for my Marxist Mentor: On Leo Panitch
It’s taken far too long time for me to write this. Many others who knew Leo Panitch – professor political science at York University in Toronto, longtime co-editor of the
Socialist Register, and author of many important essays and books – for a longer period than I did and/or saw him more regularly than I did were able to write memorials to him fairly quickly. I couldn’t. For whatever reason, when Leo died suddenly on December 19th last year – of COVID-19, of all things! In the Toronto hospital he went to for cancer treatment! – I couldn’t get over the shock. The last year has been utterly hellish but for Leo to suddenly not be in it anymore…I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. It doesn’t make sense.
The Cultural Revolutionaries at the
New York Times this week reviewed the witch hunt against classical musicians, who stand accused of racism simply because the great Western composers happened to be white. Cancel culture is despicable in all of its manifestations, but I take this particular instance personally: I trained in the school of musical analysis founded by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). My principle teacher was Carl Schachter, who also taught Prof. Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas, the target of this particular witch hunt.
It’s all about envy.
My childhood piano teacher kept a recording of Florence Foster Jenkins, the deluded society lady portrayed by Meryl Streep in a 2016 comedy, as a horrible example for youth. Her voice would de-feather a screech-owl, but no-one was allowed to tell her she couldn’t sing. The only classical musician still active who bears comparison to Ms. Jenkins is a certain Philip Ewell, now a professor of music theory at Hunte
Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles over Race and Free Speech
Michael Powell, New York Times, February 14, 2021
A periodical devoted to the study of a long-dead European music theorist is an unlikely suspect to spark an explosive battle over race and free speech.
But the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies, with a paid circulation of about 30 copies an issue per year, has ignited a fiery reckoning over race and the limits of academic free speech, along with whiffs of a generational struggle. The battle threatens to consume the career of Timothy Jackson, a 62-year-old music theory professor at the University of North Texas, and led to calls to dissolve the journal.