Flo Fox, a photographer who defeated blindness and paralysis, dies at the age of 79

Flo Fox, a steadfast photographer who was born blind in one eye, and later lost her vision in the other of the multiple sclerosis, which ultimately paralyzed her from the neck, but which never stopped shooting at what she did called Recent York’s “ironic reality” died on March 2 in her apartment in Manhattan. She was 79 years elderly.

Her son and only direct survivor, Ron Ridinger, said that the apparent reason was the complications of pneumonia.

Inspired by the 13th candid photo of the street scene made by Robert Frank, she asked her mother for a camera, but she was told to wait until she finished high school. After graduating, she designed clothing for theater and television advertising.

She was 26 years elderly – and she got married, she was born and divorced – she finally got a camera, buying a minolta with the first payment from the recent work in the design of costumes. Ridinger said that she stopped her design work after promotion of multiple sclerosis, incapacitating her hands and hindering work with clothing patterns. In the end she survived mainly social insurance and Medicaid.

Over the next five decades, she took about 180,000 photos, published a book, contributed to numerous publications and staged her work at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and galleries around the world – all despite the legally blind and dependent on the automated wheelchair.

In 2013, it was the subject of the OP-DOC film from the Recent York Times, directed by Riley Hooper.

“I have always felt that I have one great advantage that I was born in one eye and I never have to close this eye while taking a photo”, he said Viewfinder, Leica Society International Journal, in 2022, “I didn’t have to transform a three -dimensional view on a flat plain, because I saw so automatically. I had everything I had to perfectly develop the image. “

When the vision in her left eye disappeared in the vest-it was like looking through “two stockings”, said Fox went to the 35-millimeter autofocus camera. Initially, she released the shutter, pressing the rubber bulb in her mouth; Later, she took facilitate to take photos after taking the shot. She started photographing delayed during the day or at night to avoid the glow that tensed her eyes.

In 1999 she was paralyzed from the neck down, but continued to grip the candid city tables until her condition deteriorated in 2023. Curbed New YorkShe described herself as “a tourist every day in her own city.”

“Photography is my existence,” she wrote in autobiography on her website. After she left the photo of the OP, she said, which according to her was a flying saucer hovering above the park Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village-Nigdy did not go anywhere without a camera.

In 1981, 69 of her black and white photos of Recent York in the 70s was collected in “Asphalt Gardens”, a book published by the National Access Center, which described them as the celebration of “Steadfast Human Spirit fighting with a faceless system.”

The works of Mrs. Fox also appeared at the International Photography Center, Life Magazine and in several other books, including “Women See Men” and “Women Photograph Men” (both published in 1977) and “Women See Women” (1978).

In 1999, the exhibition of her photos showed what it is like to be in a wheelchair most of the time. The collection has been widespread to encourage companies and public officials to improve access for disabled people.

Among the favorite photos of Mrs. Fox were images looking down from the Flatiron building and the original World Trade Center. She put a few thematically, set them on music and He published them On YouTube.

Some of her photos were capricious: one called “Everybody Suck” was a picture of a cigarette -sucking driver, while a adolescent girl in the back seat sucks thumb. Another, called “Cover Girl”, shows a billboard with a scantily dressed model, her face covered with a tarpaulin as workers of workers below.

Florence Blossom Fox was born on September 26, 1945 in Miami Beach, one of four children of Paul and Claire (Bauer) Fox. Her father moved his family to Florida from Recent York to open a honey factory; He died when Flo was 2 years elderly and her mother took her family back to Woodside, Queens. Twelve years later, her mother died, and Flo lived with her aunt and uncle on Long Island, where she attended General Douglas Macarthur High School in Levittown.

“When I left the house, I got real education in the streets,” she recalled in an interview with the viewfinder. “At the age of 18, marriage and motherhood appeared simultaneously.”

Plucky, 5 feet-4 and highly self-taught, it was as coarse as their photos. “Do you know my biggest loss when I became disabled? I can’t even give people a finger anymore – she he said Daily News about Recent York in 2019.

She hoped that her heritage would be “that I was a tough cane,” she said in 2015. “Tough cake”.

She hoped that other legacy would facilitate support the right to improve access for disabled people and vote for ordinary Recent Yorkers, which she photographed.

“For over 30 years, Flo Fox photographed graffiti and all the works that people left to maintain memory,” she wrote in her own derivative, which she developed about 15 years ago after learning that she had lung cancer. “Now, after the death of FLO, he asks to leave a signature, initials, tag or sign of graffiti on her casket.”

Some of those whose voices and vision she promoted have never seen their own works of art – including her visually handicapped students in the photographic class in Lighthouse, run by the Recent York Association for the Blind (now Lighthouse guild).

“People in the class wanted to know what they encountered and what view was in the windows in the bedroom” She remembered. They brought the photos they took, she added: “Then we described all the colorful details.”

When one of her blind students offered a photo he took from his bedroom, she he said He: “There are trees outside the window” and the man was radiating.