Background
Cervin Robinson was born on May 18, 1928, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The younger child of Frank Robinson and Mary Burchill Robinson.
Harvard University
Cervin Robinson was born on May 18, 1928, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The younger child of Frank Robinson and Mary Burchill Robinson.
Cervin Robinson received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950 and soon after was drafted into the U. S. Army where he gained an abiding interest in map projections and perspective.
Upon return to the U.S., Cervin Robinson became the assistant for Walker Evans (1953-1957) and traveled through much of the American heartland.
In 1958, Cervin Robinson began contract work for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) photographing in the northeast sector from Maine to Pennsylvania and into the Middle West. At the same time, he acted as an American representative for the London-based Architectural Review for which he photographed major new American buildings. Ever since then, he has worked as a freelance photographer for architects and architectural magazines as well as an Adjunct Professor of Architectural Photography in summer programs at Columbia University. More significantly, between the years 1987–2009, Cervin Robinson was an editor of photoessays for the journal, Places, and contributed many of his own works. He has also exhibited in galleries and major art museums.
A member of ASMP and the Society of Architectural Historians.
Quotes from others about the person
Cervin Robinson of the Boston Globe discussing 2008 By Way of Broadway exhibit at MIT, wrote: "Robinson loves to find and record places where something new is collaged over something old ... A huge red Checks Cashed Open 24 Hours billboard splashes across what once, clearly, was an elegant movie theater in the Art Deco style. An auto body shop, with a phony castle-like façade, shoves itself rudely in front of a decayed object that appears once to have been a grand memorial arch. As we perceive such scenes, we visually peel back the present to reveal the past. Robinson is, among other things, a photographer of time itself."