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She was legally blind and used a motorized wheelchair, but she managed to capture what she called the “ironic reality” of New York City on film.
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.