Walter Rosenblum, who died January 23 at 86, was a professor of photography at Brooklyn College, and one of the outstanding socially minded photographers to emerge from the old Photo League, which he joined as a teenager and was later in charge of.

He was noted for his work in the slums of the Lower East Side and East Harlem, as well as in rural Haiti and fishing villages in the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec.

Rosenblum is said to be the most heavily decorated photographer from World War II. His accolades include a silver star, a bronze star, and a purple heart. Rosenblum waded ashore on D-Day with the first troops at Normandy. Later, he was the first photographer at the liberation of Dachau, Germany, where he shot film stock.

His later years were darkened by scandal, though, when it was found he had trafficked in forged fine-art photographs by Lewis Hine, who also documented poverty but who is perhaps most famous for his high-altitude shots of the Empire State Building. The photos were fakes only in a sense – they were apparently printed from the original negatives, but many years after Hine’s death, yet were sold as signed originals. In a negotiated settlement, Rosenblum returned a reported $1 million to six dealers without admitting any wrongdoing.

Rosenblum was raised by Jewish immigrant parents on the Lower East Side,and his childhood could have been the subject of one of his most famous photo essays, “Pitt Street 1938-39,” with its atmospheric portraits of gypsy children playing cards, mothers with strollers, and the like, all in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. After graduation from Seward Park High School, he attended City College, and took classes at the Photo League with Hine and also with Paul Strand, who would become a lifelong friend.

In 1939, he began working as assistant to a Life magazine photographer, Eliot Elisofon, and later became a staff photographer at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., before joining the Army Signal Corps in 1943. After the war, Rosenblum worked briefly for the Unitarian Service Committee, photographing refugees from the Spanish Civil War who had settled in France.

Rosenblum returned to America in 1947 to help found the photography program at Brooklyn College, where he eventually became full professor. He was also a regular faculty member at Yale’s summer school, and at Cooper Union. He retired from Brooklyn College as a full professor in 1978, and later taught in France and Italy, and mentored an enthusiastic group of young photographers in Padua.

Rosenblum served as president of the Photo League three times, including 1952, the year it folded, in part because it was under fire because of allegations that it was a Communist front. After it closed, Rosenblum came into possession of Hine’s huge collection of photographs, which had been left to the league when Hine died, in 1940. Rosenblum later donated the collection to the George Eastman House, the photography museum in Rochester, N.Y. Later news reports indicate that negatives for the suspected fraudulent photographs were missing from the museum’s collection.

In 1977, Rosenblum together with his wife,the art historian Naomi Rosenblum, curated a Lewis Hine retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Both also contributed to the exhibition catalog, “America and Lewis Hine.”

Rosenblum first came under suspi cion for purveying fraudulent photos in the late 1990s, after the market for Hine’s work heated up, with some individual prints selling in the high five figures. Most of the estimated 300-500 photos in question were sold for a fraction of that.

Dealers apparently became suspicious at the large number of original, signed Hine photographs on the market. The prints also seemed dubious because they were too well made, while Hine originals were often lower in contrast and less perfectly focused. Paper authenticators later used chemical clues to confirm that the prints in quest could not have been made prior to 1955. There were also allegations,never proven,that Rosenblum sold photographs of his own printed much later than attested. With the F.B.I. threatening investigation, Rosenblum agreed to a confidential out-of-court settlement.

Rosenblum was widely exhibited at museums and galleries in America and abroad, including major retrospectives in 1987 at the Staatsmuseum in East Berlin and at the National Museum in Havana, Cuba. He received a lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography, a Simon Wiesenthal Award, and many others.

In 1999, his daughter, Nina Rosenblum, produced an hour-long documentary about his career, “Walter Rosenblum: In Search of Pitt Street,” which included photo highlights from many parts of his lengthy career.”I always believe that my function in life is to pay homage to the people I photograph,”he says in the documentary.

Walter Rosenblum

Born October 1, 1919, in New York City; died January 23 in New York City after a lengthy illness; survived by his wife, Naomi,and his daughters, Nina and Lisa.