Leibling founded Hampshire College’s film, photography, and video program remained at Hampshire until his retirement in 1990.
Photographer Jerome Liebling, right, is seen at the Mount Holyoke Art Museum in South Hadley in 2001. He is speaking with Mount Holyoke College English Professor Christopher Benfey, during a reception marking publication of their book, "The Dickinsons of Amherst." Essays by Benfey, Polly Longsworth and Barton Levi St. Armand accompany the collection of photos by Liebling.AMHERST - “These days it seems that physical “truth” can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright.
“Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed, renown documentary photographer Jerome Liebling wrote in 1995 in the “The People, Yes.”
“But returning to the source of a thing–the real source–means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.” Liebling died Wednesday at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. He was 87 years old.
Liebling founded Hampshire College’s film, photography, and video program remained at Hampshire until his retirement in 1990, according to the college’s Web-site. His was married to Rebecca Nordstrom, a Hampshire professor of dance.
He received numerous grants and fellowships, published many books and is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
In the 1940s, he studied photography under Walter Rosenblum and Paul Strand, and joined New York’s famed Photo League. He also became involved with motion-picture production, and worked as a documentary filmmaker, according to Liebling’s site.
Among his books is “The Dickinsons of Amherst,” where he provided a glimpse of the poet’s world through his photographs of the two homes where she spent most of her life: the Homestead, where she lived and worked, and the Evergreens, built next door for her brother, Austin, and his wife, Susan.
Mount Holyoke College professor and writer Christopher Benfey worked with him on that book. He said he had seen some of the photographs. “They were the deepest, most responsive to her work over any photographs.
"Slaughterhouse Worker," by American photographer and filmmaker Jerome Liebling is among the works housed in the permanent collection at the Hampshire College Art Gallery in Amherst.“His visual understanding of writers was built on a literary understanding.” He said he leapt at the opportunity to collaborate with him. Liebling he said “was a born collaborator.”
On May 16 of 2009, the Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography, and Video was dedicated in his honor. Perhaps he best-know student filmmaker Ken Burns spoke.
At that dedication, Burns called Liebling, “my mentor, an extraordinary man, free of ambition yet possessed of the same dignity, honor and integrity that has informed the work of the greatest among us, no matter the field.
“For more than sixty years Jerome Liebling has somehow managed to balance a rich and prolific life of making great photographs—superb, achingly truthful photographs—with being a teacher, a great teacher, in the best sense of that word,” Burns said.
In a statement, Sigmund Roos, chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees, said, “With Jerry’s death, the world has lost a gifted photographer and filmmaker, and Hampshire College has lost a beloved teacher, mentor, friend, and colleague.
“He had a profound impact on Hampshire, and on the education of a whole generation of filmmakers. This is a personal loss for me and many others at the College. I will miss him dearly.”
“I really think he changed the way we see and understand our world. He would take pictures of very mundane subject and we’d see them in a different way,” said Kenneth Rosenthal, a member of the Board of Trustee’s and the college’s first treasurer, who knew Liebling for 40 years.
He influenced many students, he said and was “a very modest man.”