Abraham "Abe" Aronow was born in Brooklyn, New
York, on June 3 1940, and was raised in New Haven, Connecticut. At age ten, Aronow
began learning photography from his father who was an amateur photographer.
Following his graduation from James Hillhouse High School, he enrolled at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Bachelor of Science degree
in
1962 and then enrolled at Harvard Medical School, earning his Doctor of Medicine
degree in 1966. Three years later, he and his wife, Alice Barney Aronow (born
1942),
moved to San Francisco, California. Aronow practiced medicine in the Bay area
until
his retirement in 2007.
While working as a physician, Ansel Adams became one of Aronow’s patients in 1981.
Adams invited Aronow to a filming session attended by the surviving members of
Group
f/64 and other photographers. This began a decades-long and ongoing as of 2015
photographic project by Aronow, focusing on portraits of photographers, artists,
authors, musicians, scholars, scientists, physicians, and others.
Sources:
Abraham Aronow Photographs. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library.
Wikipedia contributors. "Abraham Aronow." In
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed September 25, 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abraham_Aronow&oldid=617262644
Scope and Contents
The collection consists of 196 photographs (185 gelatin silver prints, 11 chromogenic
color prints) by American photographer Abraham "Abe" Aronow from his series Portraits of
Contemporary Photographers. The majority of the portraits are headshots
of twentieth-century photographers, including such notable figures as Ansel Adams,
eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Elliott Erwitt, Lee Friedlander, Annie Leibovitz,
Sally
Mann, Beaumont Newhall, Arnold Newman, and Aaron Siskind. Also included are
portraits of other significant figures associated with photography including
historians, curators, and dealers. Many of the portraits were made at the Ansel
Adams Workshop in Carmel, California, with others made in the photographers' homes
and studios.
The photographs are organized in alphabetical order by subjects’ last names.
