New York
Flo Fox, 79, Dies; Street Photographer Overcame Blindness and Paralysis
Flo Fox, an indomitable photographer who was born blind in one eye and who later lost her vision in the other from multiple sclerosis — which 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 at her home 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, Ms. Fox 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, using her first paycheck to buy a Minolta from a 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. Ms. Fox eventually survived mostly on Social Security and Medicaid.
Over the next five decades she took some 180,000 photographs, published a book, contributed to numerous publications and exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and galleries around the world — all despite being legally blind and dependent on a motorized wheelchair.
In 2013, she was subject of an Op-Doc video by The New York Times, directed by Riley Hooper.
“I always felt I had one great advantage being born blind in one eye and never having to close that eye while taking a picture,” she told Viewfinder, the Leica Society International journal, in 2022. “I also didn’t have to convert a three-dimensional view to a flat plain, since that was the way I automatically saw. All I had to do was frame the image perfectly.”
As the vision in her left eye faded — it was like looking through “two stockings,” she said — Ms. Fox switched to a 35-millimeter autofocus camera. She initially released the shutter by pressing a rubber bulb in her mouth; later, she enlisted help to shoot the pictures after she had framed the shot. She began photographing late in the day or at night, to avoid glare that strained her eyes.
By 1999, Ms. Fox was paralyzed from the neck down, but she continued to capture candid urban tableaus until her condition worsened in 2023. In a 2015 interview with the website Curbed New York, she described herself as “a tourist every day in my own town.”
“Photography is my existence,” she wrote in an autobiographical sketch on her website. After missing a once-in-a-lifetime photo op, she said — she saw what she believed was a flying saucer hovering over Abingdon Square Park in Greenwich Village — she never went anywhere without her camera.
In 1981, 69 of her black-and-white images of New York City in the 1970s were collected in “Asphalt Gardens,” a book published by the National Access Center. It described them as celebrating “an indomitable human spirit struggling against a faceless system.”
Ms. Fox’s work also appeared at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, in Life magazine and in several other books, including “Women See Men” and “Women Photograph Men” (both published in 1977) and “Women See Women” (1978).
In 1999, an exhibition of her photographs showed what it’s like to be in a wheelchair much of the time. The collection was disseminated to encourage businesses and public officials to improve access for people with disabilities.
Among Ms. Fox’s favorite photographs were images looking down from the Flatiron Building and the original World Trade Center. She arranged several thematically, set them to music and posted them on YouTube.
Some of her photographs were whimsically titled: One called “Everybody Sucks” was an image of a driver sucking on a cigarette while a young girl in the back seat sucks her thumb. Another, called “Cover Girl,” shows a billboard with a scantily clad reclining model, her face obscured by a tarp as workmen labor below.
Florence Blossom Fox was born on Sept. 26, 1945, in Miami Beach, one of four children of Paul and Claire (Bauer) Fox. Her father had moved the family to Florida from New York City to open a honey factory; he died when Flo was 2, and her mother took the family back to Woodside, Queens. Twelve years later, her mother died, and Flo went to live with an aunt and uncle on Long Island, where she attended General Douglas MacArthur High School, in Levittown.
“When I left home, I got my real education on the streets,” she recalled in the Viewfinder interview. “At age 18, marriage and motherhood came simultaneously.”
Plucky, 5-foot-4 and largely self-taught, she was as gritty as her photographs. “You know my greatest loss when I became disabled? I can’t even give people the finger anymore,” she told The Daily News of New York in 2019.
She hoped that her legacy would be “that I was a tough chick,” she said in 2015. “A tough cookie.”
Other legacies, she hoped, would be helping to foster laws improving access for people with disabilities and to give voice to the ordinary New Yorkers she photographed.
“For over 30 years Flo Fox photographed graffiti and any artwork that people left to sustain their memory,” she wrote in her own eulogy, which she drafted about 15 years ago after learning that she had lung cancer. “Now in death, Flo requests that you leave your signature, initials, tag or graffiti mark on her coffin.”
Some of those whose voices and vision she promoted never got to see their own artwork; among them were her visually impaired students in a photography class at the Lighthouse, run by the New York Association for the Blind (now Lighthouse Guild).
“Those in the class wanted to know what they had encountered and what the view was out their bedroom windows,” she recalled. They brought in photos they had taken, she added, “and we then described all the colorful details to them.”
When one of her blind students offered a picture that he had taken from his bedroom, she told him, “There are trees outside your window.” The man beamed.
By Stefanos Chen, Maria Cramer, Christopher Maag, Wm. Ferguson, Sutton Raphael and Laura Salaberry
June 16, 2026
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Perhaps Ruby Pucillo’s number one bragging right is that she’s a tenth-generation New Yorker, one whose ancestors have lived thriftily in the boroughs since they first immigrated to New York City more than 300 years ago.
Ms. Pucillo, 25, has tried to carve out a life for herself that would mirror her family’s ideals of spending little and living a lot. But because the city her relatives arrived in generations ago now ranks among the most expensive in the world, that can present a challenge.
Ms. Pucillo’s 9 to 5 is working as an assistant editor at Abrams, an art book publishing house. After a recent promotion, her salary was bumped up to about $48,500 before taxes. Her work day begins on the subway, where she gets a head start on reading proposals and manuscripts as she travels to her office in the Financial District from uptown.
On many a weeknight, and sometimes on Saturdays, Ms. Pucillo performs as an improv jazz musician. She studied music and loves to play, but the amount she makes fluctuates — sometimes netting her upward of $1,000 in a month, other times $25, often something in the middle.
On Sundays, Ms. Pucillo travels back to where she grew-up, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., to teach French and give voice lessons for $350 a month.
All told, she makes about $55,000 a year, with wiggle room for her jazz gigs.
Rent is High, but Community is Free
Ms. Pucillo lives in a rent-stabilized prewar apartment with two roommates in West Harlem. Rent runs her about $1,460 a month, including utilities and internet.
“I spend more than half my income on my rent,” Ms. Pucillo said. “But I really like my apartment, and I live on the most beautiful block in Manhattan. Community is completely free.”
After rent is paid, Ms. Pucillo diligently tracks the leftovers of her paychecks on a spreadsheet on her computer; she can account for almost every cent. Each month, she spends $300 or less on groceries and $140 of her gross monthly income goes toward public transit, using a pretax subsidy her job offers.
Then Ms. Pucillo has a “cushion” tier of expenses, for unforeseen circumstances like a co-pay at the doctor’s office, a late-night taxi ride or a case of beer for a friend who might have done her a favor, like helping her move. “I know I’m not going to pay for these things every month,” she said, “but it’s nice to have a monthly increment that either goes into my savings or comes back out of my savings later.”
Ms. Pucillo’s monthly splurge is on entertainment — dining out, live music and shows, admission fees. “I budget $500 a month for that,” she said, which she conceded felt like a lot. “But it can disappear quickly in this city.”
And twice a year, she treats herself to a curly cut done by a friend on Long Island, for the budget total of $73 — not including, of course, a tip and the cost of a Long Island Rail Road ticket.
Ms. Pucillo doesn’t pay for many streaming services, but every few weeks she pays $3 to watch a movie on YouTube. She also pays $12.99 a month for Apple News and $10.99 for Apple Music. The remaining money goes into her savings.
An Eye for Deals
Many in Ms. Pucillo’s orbit “are in a difficult financial spot, too,” she said. “Many of them are creative and have a similar idea of what it means to achieve financial stability and what it means to make your dollar stretch.”
Ms. Pucillo’s ideal equation involves doubling or tripling up on activities to get the most bang for her buck, especially when it involves something free or a promotion that makes it very cheap.
When the fitness app ClassPass offered a discounted rate of $5 per month, she signed up so she could attend cheap workout and dance classes with friends. When she found a $1-a-month deal for a cooking app, she took it so she could share meals with friends without restaurant prices.
“I’m very opportunistic,” she said. “When things come up, I take them, but otherwise I figure out how to do just about everything for free.”
Recently, Ms. Pucillo had the shopping bug, but lacked the funds to act on it, so she and a group of friends arranged a clothing swap. Everyone emerged with new pieces for their wardrobe, she said, without spending a dime.
Ms. Pucillo credits her upbringing for making resourcefulness feel second nature.
“I come from a base line that says, ‘Don’t buy anything,’” she said. Her parents moved the family to Westchester when she was young and started renting in Hastings-on-Hudson because, she said, “they wanted to put us through really good public schools. They said, ‘If you can’t be rich, live where rich people live.’”
Ms. Pucillo is grateful for that. “I had to find ways to make money,” she said, which propelled her toward “what probably will be a different and better financial situation than my parents had, and than their parents had.” Her parents have since moved from Westchester to the Bronx.
She noted that because of an array of part-time jobs she worked during her undergraduate years, a hefty scholarship and a family tradition of supporting one’s children through college, she graduated debt-free, unlike many people she knows.
Saving Up for a Piece of the City
Even with a tendency toward frugality, she said, it’s still hard to navigate New York City as a 20-something, where the incomes of friends vary, and there are so many things that entice, especially when your friends want to drop money and you don’t.
“This is a very expensive place to socialize,” Ms. Pucillo said. But she’d never consider moving.
“The people in New York — I understand them, and they understand me,” she said. “There’s a directness that you really don’t find anywhere else.”
Ms. Pucillo’s dream is to own an apartment in the city — “a pretty lofty goal in this place,” she said. Despite the nine generations of New Yorkers that came before her, Ms. Pucillo’s family doesn’t own any property.
This is why Ms. Pucillo is dedicated to building up her savings however she can, and she is preparing to open her first line of credit after years of holding out.
Ms. Pucillo’s father, a guitar teacher and a Staten Island native, has always been fond of asking this question: If you had the choice between staying in New York for the rest of your life and never being allowed to leave, or being able to go anywhere else in the world, but never returning to New York — which would you choose?
She doesn’t have to deliberate for a second. “Absolutely, I would stay in New York for the rest of my life, and I would never leave.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
new video loaded: Fans Celebrate Knicks’ First N.B.A. Title in 53 Years
transcript
transcript
Fans Celebrate Knicks’ First N.B.A. Title in 53 Years
New York City erupted in celebration after the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals to win their first championship since 1973.
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[cheering] “We did it. We hung in there, and we brought it home, baby. New York!” “This is insane. Like, I don’t know what — I don’t know how else to describe it.”
By Julie Yoon
June 14, 2026
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