Ben Rosen with his camera

Seeing Cincinnati through a Different Lens

Ben Rosen (1913- ) is a witness to much of Cincinnati history. He grew up in Newport, Kentucky and the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, and began work as a photographer's apprentice in high school. His first major assignment was photographing a stop on Charles Lindbergh's victory tour at the Lunken Airport in Cincinnati. When his supervisor, Dan Morgenthaler, died in 1937, Rosen purchased the company from his widow and took over. Rosen was drafted into the army in 1943 and worked in a photography lab doing reconnaissance work until 1945 when he returned to Cincinnati. Throughout the seventy-five years of Rosen's photography career, he took pictures of visiting celebrities and politicians, snapped religious life through his work for The American Israelite and The Catholic Telegraph, and took a plethora of pictures of historic and modern Cincinnati. The Ben Rosen Photograph Collection was donated to the American Jewish Archives in 2007.