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.

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at the art shoppers can find when they go to a Trader Joe’s in Manhattan.

Julie Averbach led the way into what she said was an art gallery.

It didn’t look like one. There were no velvet ropes in front of the most valuable pieces, and no little labels on the wall saying who had created the art.

But this was not really an art gallery. It was a supermarket, the Trader Joe’s at 2073 Broadway, near West 72nd Street, a place to experience “the joy of finding beauty where we least expect it,” Averbach said. Above the refrigerated display cases and the fruit and vegetable bins. In the aisles. On the packages that sit on the shelves.

“When we typically go to a grocery store, we tend to look straight at the shelves, put the products in our carts, buy them and go home,” she said. “I’ve come to look up, look down and go into a mode of art appreciation first and buying second. The store and the products themselves are art.” At Trader Joe’s, she said, “even a simple banana display becomes a 360-degree art installation” topped by King Kong, suspended from the ceiling.

She moved on to a mural scene above the avocados. It showed four figures dancing on the Lincoln Center steps, with the Metropolitan Opera House in the background: a package of Joe-Joe’s chocolate-and-vanilla-cream sandwich cookies, a bottle of pink lemonade, a shaker of “Everything but the Bagel” seasoning and a can of corn.

“The corn can is a recurring symbol through a lot of Trader Joe’s artwork,” she said. It turned up in a narrow painting of the Statue of Liberty a few steps away. Lady Liberty is holding a can of corn “as her torch of enlightenment,” Averbach said. In the other hand is a box of Joe’s O’s cereal. The actual statue holds a tablet inscribed with the date July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals.

Averbach is a Trader Joe’s fan with an art historian’s eye. She became so fascinated by what she saw in Trader Joe’s locations that she wrote the book “The Art of Trader Joe’s: Discovering the Hidden Art Gems of America’s Favorite Grocery Store” after devoting her thesis at Yale to Trader Joe’s as a contemporary cabinet of curiosities. She did her research on her own, based mostly on “what I could see in the stores as a regular shopper” who has visited more than 170 locations. She received no official help from the chain and put the word “unauthorized” on the cover of the book to emphasize her independence. An email to Trader Joe’s seeking comment went unanswered on Friday.

Looking for what had inspired the images in packaging like the label for the store’s Caesar salad, she spent “countless hours” eyeing Victorian ephemera and paging through 19th-century magazines. (It’s not Julius Caesar on the salad’s container; it’s Augustus, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son.)

And the image on the can of Trader Joe’s French roast coffee? Averbach traced it to a 1913 book, “The Spirit of Paris.”

Averbach said that Trader Joe’s is unusual among supermarket chains: Each store has in-house artists who create handmade signs, she said, so no two Trader Joe’s stores look alike. And as Averbach discovered, the artists do more than make signs.

In a Trader Joe’s in Manchester, Conn., she found a chalk drawing of a figure that looked like the famous Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. But this one had a Trader Joe’s employee name tag with “Mona L.” written on it.

In other stores, Averbach found adaptations of Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker,” Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

In a Trader Joe’s in Chicago, she found a representation of the late-night diner in Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” with a Trader Joe’s sign above the window. Hopper said the restaurant in his painting was inspired by one in Greenwich Avenue in Manhattan, but the Trader Joe’s image paid tribute to the painting’s longtime home, the Art Institute of Chicago.

Averbach talked about neighborhood references as she walked through the Trader Joe’s on Broadway. That store is “hands down the busiest Trader Joe’s in the world,” the company said in 2021. Of the Trader Joe’s locations in New York, it is her favorite aesthetically. But she also mentioned the store at 436 East 14th Street, where the illustrator Peter Arkle created more than 150 images called “East Village Drawings.” They are keyed to a map in the store showing “where you can find all the real things that inspired the drawings,” according to Arkle’s website.

In the Broadway store, even the elevators doors are art, painted to show dinosaurs shopping, a nod to the nearby American Museum of Natural History. The artists have also made something of places that are off limits to shoppers, as Averbach realized after seeing the exhibition “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple of years ago.

“They could have simply written ‘staff only’ on the door,” Averbach said. “They instead used the door as a canvas for a trompe l’oeil painting,” with a green T-shirt on a coat hanger. “Who does that? It’s amazing.”

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Expect a partly sunny sky, with the temperature reaching a high of 62. At night temperatures will drop to the low 40s.

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In effect until Friday (Purim).

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Dear Diary:

Back home from Boston for the holidays, Dean and Dylan and I watched “Anora” at the Angelika because we were the last ones still on winter break.

We walked uptown afterward, laughing about the movie and about the guy next to us who had laughed though the whole movie.

I was going to turn off at 23rd Street to go to the PATH station. Dylan and Dean were going to keep walking to 33rd Street to catch the Q train.

We walked a few blocks backpedaling as the cold wind blew hard at our faces.

“I’ll see you guys again for spring break,” I said as I got ready to turn.

“I think I’ll be on a spring break trip with some school friends,” Dylan said.

“All right,” I said. “Well, some time else then. Love you bro, see ya.”

Federal immigration authorities on Saturday detained a well-known activist who played a major role in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian student movement last year, his lawyer said on Sunday.

The arrest of the activist, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was a significant escalation of President Trump’s crackdown on what he has called antisemitic campus activity.

The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, is of Palestinian heritage and graduated in December with a master’s degree from the university’s school of international affairs, according to his LinkedIn. His lawyer, Amy Greer, confirmed that he was a green card holder and said the arrest would face a vigorous legal challenge.

“We will vigorously be pursuing Mahmoud’s rights in court, and will continue our efforts to right this terrible and inexcusable — and calculated — wrong committed against him,” Ms. Greer said in a statement. The arrest, she said, “follows the U.S. government’s open repression of student activism and political speech.”

Ms. Greer said she was not sure of Mr. Khalil’s “precise whereabouts,” and that he may have been transferred as far away as Louisiana. Mr. Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, tried to visit him at a detention center in New Jersey but was told he was not being held there, Ms. Greer said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement on Sunday night that Mr. Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

“Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” she said. “ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump’s executive orders and to protecting U.S. national security.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

The immigration agents who detained Mr. Khalil told him his student visa had been revoked, Ms. Greer said, even though he does not currently hold such a visa. Revoking a green card is quite rare, said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia Law School, and in a vast majority of cases where it does happen, the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses, she said.

If the government was to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card “in retaliation for his public speech, that is prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Ms. Mukherjee said, adding that she was still learning details about this particular case.

Jodi Ziesemer, the director of the immigrant protection unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group, said the revocation process is typically lengthy. A green card holder can be detained, but not deported, during that process, she said.

Mr. Khalil was a fixture at the protests that engulfed Columbia last spring, making the Manhattan campus the national epicenter of demonstrations against the war in Gaza. He described his role to reporters as a negotiator and spokesman for Columbia’s pro-Palestinian group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

The Trump administration has made Columbia the first target of its push to punish what the president has deemed elite schools’ failures to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

On Friday, the administration announced that it had canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to the university. In a social media post last week, Mr. Trump vowed to punish individual protesters his administration considered “agitators.”

“All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”

In a statement on Sunday, Columbia administrators did not comment directly on the arrest.

“Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community,” the statement read. “We are also committed to the legal rights of our students and urge all members of the community to be respectful of those rights.”

The arrest drew swift condemnation from some free speech groups, immigrant rights’ activists and politicians on Sunday.

Donna Lieberman, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that the detention “reeks of McCarthyism.” She added that the arrest was “a frightening escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech and an aggressive abuse of immigration law.”

Zohran Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman who is running for mayor, called the detention “a blatant assault on the First Amendment and a sign of advancing authoritarianism under Trump.” Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has faced backlash from some pro-Israel groups for his criticism of Israel.

And Murad Awawdeh, the president of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement, “This blatantly unconstitutional act sends a deplorable message that freedom of speech is no longer protected in America.”

But the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, which has been calling for aggressive action against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, praised Mr. Khalil’s detention in a series of social media posts, calling Mr. Khalil, without evidence, a “ringleader“ of the chaos at Columbia.

Mr. Khalil told Reuters before his arrest on Saturday that he feared that he would be targeted by the federal government.

“Clearly Trump is using the protesters as a scapegoat for his wider agenda fighting and attacking higher education and the Ivy League education system,” he said.

Mr. Khalil was active as a negotiator for protesters last week at Barnard College, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia, which erupted after the college announced that it was expelling two students for disrupting a course on modern Israel. When Barnard’s president, Laura Rosenbury, called protesters on the phone to negotiate during one sit-in on campus, Mr. Khalil held up a megaphone to amplify her voice.

Mr. Khalil himself was briefly suspended from Columbia last spring for his role in the protests before the school reversed the decision. He has a diplomatic background and has worked at the British Embassy in Beirut, according to an online biography.

Over the last few days, critics of the protest movement at Columbia have singled out Mr. Khalil on social media. Shai Davidai, a vocal pro-Israel professor at Columbia who was barred from campus after the university said he intimidated and harassed employees, called on Mr. Rubio to deport Mr. Khalil.

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.