Flo Fox, an indomitable photographer who was born blind in one eye and later lost her vision in the other from multiple sclerosis, which also eventually paralyzed her from the neck down, but who never stopped shooting what she called the “ironic reality” of New York’s streetscape, died on March 2 in her apartment in Manhattan. She was 79.
Her son and only immediate survivor, Ron Ridinger, said the apparent cause was complications of pneumonia.
Inspired at 13 by a candid photograph of a street scene taken by Robert Frank, she asked her mother for a camera but was told to wait until she finished high school. After graduating, she designed clothing for the theater and television commercials.
It wasn’t until she was 26 — and had married, given birth and been divorced — that she finally got a camera, buying a Minolta with her first paycheck from a new costume design job. She stopped her design work after her multiple sclerosis advanced, incapacitating her hands and making it hard to work with clothing patterns, Mr. Ridinger said in an interview. She eventually survived mostly on Social Security and Medicaid.
Over the next five decades she took some 180,000 photographs, published a book, contributed to numerous publications and exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and galleries around the world — all despite being legally blind and dependent on a motorized wheelchair.
In 2013, she was subject of an Op-Doc film from The New York Times, directed by Riley Hooper.
“I always felt I had one great advantage being born blind in one eye and never having to close that eye while taking a picture,” she told Viewfinder, the Leica Society International journal, in 2022. “I also didn’t have to convert a three-dimensional view to a flat plain, since that was the way I automatically saw. All I had to do was frame the image perfectly.”
As the vision in her left eye faded to a gauzy view — it was like looking through “two stockings,” she said — Ms. Fox switched to a 35-millimeter autofocus camera. She initially released the shutter by pressing a rubber bulb in her mouth; later, she enlisted help to shoot the pictures after she had framed the shot. She began photographing late in the day or at night, to avoid glare that strained her eyes.
By 1999 she was paralyzed from the neck down, but she continued to capture candid urban tableaus until her condition worsened in 2023. In a 2015 interview with the website Curbed New York, she described herself as “a tourist every day in my own town.”
“Photography is my existence,” she wrote in an autobiography on her website. After missing a once-in-a-lifetime photo op, she said — she saw what she believed was a flying saucer hovering over Abingdon Square Park in Greenwich Village — she never went anywhere without her camera.
In 1981, 69 of her black-and-white images of New York City in the 1970s were collected in “Asphalt Gardens,” a book published by the National Access Center, which described them as celebrating “an indomitable human spirit struggling against a faceless system.”
Ms. Fox’s work also appeared at the International Center of Photography, in 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, an exhibition of her photographs showed what it’s like to be in a wheelchair much of the time. The collection was disseminated to encourage businesses and public officials to improve access for people with disabilities.
Among Ms. Fox’s favorite photographs were images looking down from the Flatiron Building and the original World Trade Center. She arranged several thematically, set them to music and posted them on YouTube.
Some of her photographs were whimsically titled: One called “Everybody Sucks” was an image of a driver sucking on a cigarette while a young girl in the back seat sucks her thumb. Another, called “Cover Girl,” shows a billboard with a scantily clad reclining model, her face obscured by a tarp as workmen labor below.
Florence Blossom Fox was born on Sept. 26, 1945, in Miami Beach, one of four children of Paul and Claire (Bauer) Fox. Her father had moved the family to Florida from New York City to open a honey factory; he died when Flo was 2, and her mother took the family back to Woodside, Queens. Twelve years later, her mother died, and Flo went to live with an aunt and uncle on Long Island, where she attended General Douglas MacArthur High School, in Levittown.
“When I left home, I got my real education on the streets,” she recalled in the Viewfinder interview. “At age 18, marriage and motherhood came simultaneously.”
Plucky, 5-foot-4 and largely self-taught, she was as gritty as her photographs. “You know my greatest loss when I became disabled? I can’t even give people the finger anymore,” she told The Daily News of New York in 2019.
She hoped that her legacy would be “that I was a tough chick,” she said in 2015. “A tough cookie.”
Other legacies, she hoped, would be helping to foster laws improving access for people with disabilities and giving voice to the ordinary New Yorkers she photographed.
“For over 30 years Flo Fox photographed graffiti and any artwork that people left to sustain their memory,” she wrote in her own eulogy, which she drafted about 15 years ago after learning that she had lung cancer. “Now in death, Flo requests that you leave your signature, initials, tag or graffiti mark on her coffin.”
Some of those whose voices and vision she promoted never got to see their own artwork — including her visually impaired students in a photography class at the Lighthouse, run by the New York Association for the Blind (now Lighthouse Guild).
“Those in the class wanted to know what they had encountered and what the view was out their bedroom windows,” she recalled. They brought in photos they had taken, she added, “and we then described all the colorful details to them.”
When one of her blind students offered a picture he had taken from his bedroom, she told him, “There are trees outside your window,” and the man beamed.
