For Mel Rosenthal, there’s no point in taking a picture if it isn’t going to do some good in this world. Photographs, he said, have to connect with the community where they’re made, not just to be exhibited there but to engage residents in discussions.
“I’m not an artist,” he told Lens in 2011, “I’m a messenger.”
That urgent message, of social activism and community engagement, is on display at the Museum of the City of New York in the exhibit “In the South Bronx of America.” The show’s 42 images were made from 1976 to 1982, during a difficult era when the area was infamous for its burning buildings and rubble-strewn landscapes. It was a time when many photographers made quick forays to the Bronx taking — in every sense — images that emphasized drama and dysfunction rather than the real lives of real people.
Mr. Rosenthal’s images sometimes show empty lots and abandoned buildings, but the photos are about the people, who always have dignity. That’s partly because he talked with everyone, no matter their station in life, on the same level and with compassion. Perhaps it’s because he, too, was born in the Bronx and mostly grew up there. For a few years his family lived in South Carolina, where he said they encountered anti-Semitism. They returned to the Bronx.
Mr. Rosenthal graduated from City College and became involved in the civil rights movement. After teaching English at Vassar College for a couple of years, he found photography, which he said fit perfectly with his social activism. In 1975 he started teaching photography at SUNY Empire State College, and he urged his students to get close to their subjects.
When he started to photograph his old Bronx neighborhood, he held himself to that same standard. The South Bronx was awash in social activism at the time, and Mr. Rosenthal photographed many demonstrations there. He participated in a few of those protests himself.
“I had shows in local bars,” he said. “I photographed everyone on Bathgate Avenue. I always gave pictures back to the people. I always told my students, ‘You lose points if you don’t give pictures back to your subjects.’ ”
One of those students was Ricky Flores, who is now a staff photographer for The Journal News in Westchester. He grew up in the Longwood section of the Bronx and knew many of the people Mr. Rosenthal photographed.
“Mel was not parachuting in and documenting a foreign place,” Mr. Flores said. “He always talked about showing people in a compassionate way. Other photographers don’t always get that. Their work is done just for themselves, instead of raising questions of what’s going on and how do we change that.”
Over the more than 35 years that Mr. Rosenthal was at Empire State, he taught and mentored generations of young documentarians including Andrew Lichtenstein, Catherine McGann and Meg Handler.
“Mel’s influence had to do with how one approached making and looking at pictures,” said Ms. Handler, a photographer who is also editor at large of Reading the Pictures. “It was about being humanistic, empathic and really feeling a connection — a commitment — to what one was photographing, and the story one was attempting to tell. For a certain group of photographers in N.Y.C. in the early ’90s, I feel like Mel encouraged us to be progressive, socially aware and, at the same time, as objective as we could be.”
Michael Kamber, was living in the South Bronx in the 1980s when Mr. Rosenthal let him sit in on classes even though he couldn’t afford the tuition.
“There was all of the things you got other places, like composition and technique, but Mel was completely focused on social change for the community where you were photographing,” Mr. Kamber said. “Mel planted the idea that you can do good with your camera.”
Like starting the Bronx Documentary Center, which Mr. Kamber did in 2011 to showcase photojournalism and train new generations of Bronx residents. If not for Mr. Rosenthal’s example, Mr. Kamber said, there might never have been a Bronx Documentary Center.
The most important lesson?
“It’s not just a job,” Mr. Kamber said. “It’s a calling.”
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