Cervin Robinson, an architectural photographer known for his commanding, monochromatic images of early-20th-century architecture, has died at age 94. “The pervasive use of color film in the late 1970s,” he lamented, “solved no problems that architectural photographers had been interested in, such as how to include people in pictures; it only distracted them from those questions and presented them with new and, as it happened, less interesting ones, such as how to reconcile fluorescent light sources with incandescent ones.” To Robinson, black and white was better suited to capturing raw architectural form.
Born in Boston in 1928, Robinson always had a knack for photography, architecture, and writing—three disciplines that defined his career. He began taking photographs at age 12, was the son of an architect, and studied English literature at Harvard University. After serving in the U.S. Army, Robinson worked in New York from 1953 to 1957 as an assistant to photographer and photojournalist Walker Evans, well known for his Great Depression–era portraiture of rural America for the Farm Security Administration. But it was in Evans’s articulate imagery of vernacular architecture and roadside Americana that Robinson found refuge.
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