Benjamin J. Fernandez, photojournalist and mentor, dies at age 84

Benedict J. Fernandez, a professed “photo-anthropologist” who captured the persona of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the fervor of the King era’s protest movements before mentoring a generation of professional photographers, died Jan. 31 at his home in Oxford, New York. He was 84.

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Siiri Fernandez, said.

Benedict Fernandez became an award-winning photojournalist and documentarian by transforming adversities to his advantage. Raised in East Harlem, a New York City neighborhood where he struggled with reading in school because of undiagnosed dyslexia, he was not yet a teenager when he received a simple Brownie camera as a gift and discovered a new form of expression.

That avocation became his profession in the early 1960s when Fernandez, a graduate of Haaren High School in Manhattan, was laid off from his job as a crane operator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was being phased out.

As a seasoned photographer, he taught disadvantaged city youths free of charge at the Benedict J. Fernandez Photo Film Workshop, which he established in the basement of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in Manhattan. His protégés included Angel Franco, a Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times photojournalist. Fernandez went on to create the photography department at the Parsons School of Design/The New School.

His evocative, mostly black-and-white photographs reflected the trust he earned from his subjects. His images captured the passion of civil rights and anti-war protests and the intimacy of King’s family at the dinner table.

Interviewed by the website PhotoPhilanthropy in 2012, Fernandez explained why he preferred to be called a photo-anthropologist: “A journalist is someone that writes and talks about photography. I live it. Basically, I live it. I have to have something happening to make the pictures. I don’t sit down and take the camera and say I’m going to take pictures. Click. Click. Click. No, something has to happen in order for me to want to take the pictures, because I don’t read or write. I live.”

Benedict Joseph Fernandez III was born in Manhattan on April 5, 1936. His father, who was born in Puerto Rico, was an office manager. His mother, Pamela (Perella) Fernandez, was a homemaker.

In 1957, he married Siiri Aarismaa, who survives him. He is also survived by a son, Benedict IV; a daughter, Tina Polvere; five grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

While working as a crane operator in Brooklyn and at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Hoboken, New Jersey, Fernandez photographed fellow workers for a project he called “Riggers.” He then got a lucky break when, after giving another photographer some rolls of spare film, the photographer introduced him to Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper’s Bizarre and founder of the Design Laboratory, a workshop for photographers and designers.

Their meeting led to a scholarship to the Design Laboratory for Fernandez and a job running the darkroom at the Parsons School of Design. He went on to become head of the school’s fledgling photography department, recruiting professional photographers as teachers.