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Remembering Nathan Farb
7 April 2026
Nathan Farb died late last month at his home in Adirondack Park. He was 85.
Farb was born in Konawa, Okla., seven months after his father Nathan, who had owned a clothing and jewelry store, died. He was only able to see his father in photographs.
“How could I have become anything else but a photographer?” he told The New York Times in 2017.
He became enamored with the Adirondacks when his mother, a violinist who taught music, married Rabbi Alfred Kahn in 1945 and they moved to Lake Placid, N.Y.
After Rabbi Kahn died in 1955, he and his mother moved to Hackensack, N.J. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at Rutgers in 1963. He subsequently worked at Columbia University's School of Social Work, as a computer programmer for the Head Start program and briefly as a reporter for The Record of New Jersey.
He was in his mid-twenties in the 1960s when he bought a Pentax and began photographing the Lower East Side and East Village, which led to some momentous moments.
He taught at Rutgers in the 1970s and the New School for Social Research in the 1980s and did freelance photography for The Times, Life and Audubon magazines and other publications. He also published books of his photos, among which were two on the Galápagos Islands and three on the Adirondacks.
Among his other projects was a 1977 trip to Siberia in which he set up a photo studio to shoot portraits, a return trip there 41 years later, and a visit to Romania earlier than either.
His photographs are included in the collections of MoMA, J. Paul Getty Museum, The National Gallery of Art, The Biblioteque National and the International Center of Photography, among many others.
In addition to his Pentax, he used a 4x5 with Polaroid film in Siberia, an 8x10 Deardorf in the Adirondacks and later a digital camera.
"The camera satisfied so many needs for me: the need to be with people, the need to connect to people, the need to express myself, the need to be able to comment on society," he once explained photography's attraction for him.
He is survived by his daughters Esme Pearl Farb and Ruth Sergel and his life partner Kathleen Carroll.
You can read Richard Sandomir's obituary (gift link) in the New York Times, which is accompanied by a gallery of his images in Nathan Farb's Roving Lens (gift link). His Web site notes, "Later in the summer we will throw a Nathan style celebration of his life. Expect live music, good eats and a lot of stories. "