Bob Adelman, the American photographer of the Civil Rights Movement, died on 19 March, aged 85. Born in Brooklyn, Adelman took his BA from Rutgers University in 1951 before studying law at Harvard. He studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, and Jacques Lowe, President Kennedy’s official photographer. Race relations were a constant concern for him and his initial photographs of black jazz musicians soon led him to protest segregation. In 1963, he volunteered as a photographer to the Civil Rights Movement, which enabled him, for example, to take dramatic close-ups of Martin Luther King as he delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. His pictures appeared in Time, Life and The New York Times Magazine.
John Christian, the art historian and leading expert on Edward Burne-Jones, died on 10 March, aged 73. As a schoolboy, Christian contacted Sir Sydney Cockerell, William Morris’s last secretary, and regularly corresponded with and visited him until his death in 1962. Christian attended Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he studied the history of art under Michael Jaffé. In the 1970s he helped James Byam Shaw to catalogue the Old Master drawings in Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1975 he designed the landmark Burne-Jones exhibition for the Arts Council at the Hayward Gallery, the event that led to the rediscovery of the artist. With Stephen Wildman he wrote the catalogue of the 1998 exhibition, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Peggy Fortnum, the illustrator who drew the defining images of Paddington Bear, died on 28 March, aged 96. Fortnum won a place at Tunbridge Wells School of Art in 1939 and served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. After the war, she enrolled in the Central School of Art. After her graduation she worked as an art teacher, painter and textile designer and soon became a full-time illustrator. In 1957, William Collins & Sons, the publisher, sent her the manuscript of Michael Bond’s children’s book, A Bear Called Paddington, for which she made 30 drawings from sketches she made of a Malayan bear in London Zoo. From then until 1974, she illustrated all 11 of the Paddington Bear series, along with 80 other books by writers such as Noel Streatfeild, Kenneth Grahame and Jane Gardam.
Oumar Ly, the Senegalese photographer of West African life, died on 29 February, aged 73. He left school at 14 to eke out a living for his family by selling vegetables at the French military base at Podor, his hometown, in northern Senegal. He became fascinated by photography when someone took a picture of him and by carefully saving his small income he bought his first camera, a Kodak Brownie. During his stint of national service, he discovered photography studios in Dakar and the work of pioneering photographer Demba Assane Sy, who became a mentor. Returning to Podor in 1963, he set up his own studio and began his life’s work of portraiture of the local inhabitants. In all he left an archive of more than 5,000 images that commemorate the timeless world of rural life.
Malick Sidibé, the Malian photographer of 1960s popular culture in the capital city, Bamako, died on 14 April, aged 80. Sidibé was trained first at the School of Sudanese Craftsmen and then as an apprentice at Gérard Guillat-Guignard’s Photo Service Boutique. He bought his first camera in 1956 and opened his own studio in 1958. He specialised in documentary photography, increasingly using black and white images to capture 1960s youth culture at sporting events, nightclubs, concerts and on the beach. In the 1970s he turned to making studio portraits. The first edition, in 1994, of the Rencontres de Bamako (Bamako Encounters), the African photography biennial, brought Sidibé wider recognition. In 2003, he was the first African photographer to receive the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and in 2007, he won a Venice Biennale Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement.