Nathan Farb, a photographer whose peripatetic career took him from downtown Manhattan during the summer of 1967, when he captured scenes of the counterculture, to a city in Siberia, where he set up a studio and created stark portraits of Russians, and then to the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where he trekked to remote locations to shoot painterly landscapes, died on March 26 at his home in Jay, a town in Adirondack Park. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Ruth Sergel, who did not specify a cause.
Mr. Farb did not pick up a camera in a serious way until he was 25, but when he did, he felt an immediate desire to be a photographer.
“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 said in “Nathan Farb and the Cold War,” a 2024 documentary by Nathaniel Knop about Mr. Farb’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1977 and his return visit 41 years later.
He initially traveled to Siberia during an era of détente between the United States and Soviet Union. After another photographer dropped out, Mr. Farb was invited to join “Photography USA,” a United States Information Agency-sponsored exhibition that toured six Soviet cities, displaying photos of American life and examples of photographic technology.
Mr. Farb, who had accompanied a similar exhibition to Romania several years earlier, took the opportunity to set up a photography studio in Novosibirsk, a city in Siberia, and got to work.
Hundreds of residents of Siberia waited in line to be photographed by Mr. Farb — among them, a woman in a babushka scarf, her smile filled with steel teeth; grim-looking local Communist Party leaders, one of whom was Mr. Farb’s minder; a boy wearing oversized sunglasses and his mother’s trench coat; and a young woman with a mustache, the mistress of one of the party chiefs.
Using a large-format 4×5 camera with Polaroid film, he created a positive image that he peeled off to give to his subjects and a negative image that he used to make prints once he returned home. Those photos were published in the 1980 book “The Russians: An American Photographer Looks at the Soviet People.”
“They come across as characters from Dostoyevsky and Chekhov stories,” Edward Goldman, an art critic, wrote in HuffPost in 2018 when the photographs were exhibited at the Wende Museum in Culver City, Calif.
The same year, when Mr. Farb returned to Novosibirsk, he met with some of the people whose portraits he had taken in 1971 and photographed them again, this time with a digital camera.
“It was extraordinarily moving because the world had changed in so many ways that nobody had expected,” said Ms. Sergel, who joined him on the trip.
In addition to Ms. Sergel, his stepdaughter from his relationship with Judith Sergel, Mr. Farb is survived by his daughter from that relationship, Esme Pearl Farb, and by his life partner, Kathleen Carroll, a former film critic for The Daily News.
Nathan Edwin Farb was born on Jan. 18, 1941, in Konawa, Okla., seven months after his father, also named Nathan, died by suicide. He learned about his father, who had owned a clothing and jewelry store, through photo albums.
“How could I have become anything else but a photographer?” he told The New York Times in 2017.
His mother, Bertha (Eisen) Farb, a violinist who taught music, married Alfred Kahn, a rabbi, in 1945. The family moved to Lake Placid, N.Y., where Nathan camped and hiked in the Adirondacks, a formative experience.
Following his stepfather’s death in 1955, he and his mother moved to Hackensack, N.J. After earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Rutgers in 1963, he worked at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, as a computer programmer for the Head Start program, and then briefly as a reporter for The Record of New Jersey.
In 1967, after buying a Pentax camera, Mr. Farb began exploring the Lower East Side and East Village, particularly Tompkins Square Park, during the East Coast version of the Summer of Love, shooting images of hippies and random people kissing and dancing. He also captured well-known figures like the photographer Diane Arbus, members of the Grateful Dead and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
He caught one couple dancing in a rainstorm, their clothing drenched.
“The rain has chased everybody else out of the park, and they’re still standing in the rain, dancing,” Mr. Farb told North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y., in 2015. “In the midst of the city, they’ve achieved their solitude.”
He also photographed James Hutchinson, a hippie known as Groovy, at a demonstration at Bellevue Hospital in early October 1967, hours before Mr. Hutchinson and his girlfriend, Linda Fitzpatrick, were murdered in an Avenue B apartment while trying to buy LSD. One of Mr. Farb’s photos ran on the front page of The Daily News, accompanying the story.
Mr. Farb built a career around teaching (at Rutgers in the 1970s and the New School for Social Research in the 1980s); doing freelance photography for The Times, Life and Audubon magazines and other publications; and publishing books of his photos, including two on the Galápagos Islands and three on the Adirondacks.
He turned his focus to the Adirondacks when he was nearing 40 and “really distraught and sad, and I had to be alone for a certain period of time,” he said in an interview on “The Leonard Lopate Show” on WNYC in 2005. “I needed to be in the woods.”
The most spectacular Adirondacks scenery, he was convinced, was miles from the places most people visit. He made his way there carrying 60 pounds of equipment, including a large-format 8×10 Deardorff camera that allowed him to create images of the natural wonders he had discovered as a child, rendered with extraordinary depth of field and detail.
In the early 1980s, he took one of his favorite photos, “Lost Pond” — an image of a lone, thin tree standing amid felled trees in the middle of misty Lost Pond, in Moose River Plains, N.Y. — by submerging himself and his camera in the water until the surface was still enough to shoot.
“I was trying to make images that would represent points where you could meditate,” he told Adirondack Life magazine in 2022.
“In some subtle way,” he added, “I wanted viewers to see how nature was working in the moment, helping them to connect with their deepest self.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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