Adelman used his background as a graduate student in
applied aesthetics from
Columbia University to forge close ties with leading figures of art and literature, including
Andy Warhol and
Samuel Beckett. After studying photography for several years under the tutelage of ''
Harper's Bazaar'' art director
Alexey Brodovitch, Adelman volunteered as a photographer for the
Congress of Racial Equality in the early 1960s, a position which granted him access to key leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including
Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King Jr. and
James Baldwin. Adelman's work captured a decade of racial strife during the 1960s, including portraits of Martin Luther King reciting his
I Have a Dream speech, the fifty-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, and King resting in his casket after the
assassination. His photos, some of which are archived at the
Library of Congress, captured segregation and civil unrest in the South. In 2007, he published
Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Struggle for Civil Rights. Westwood Gallery NYC presented the premiere gallery exhibition for Bob Adelman's civil rights photographs in 2008, curated by James Cavello. The gallery held an event on 4 April 2008 marking the fortieth anniversary of King's death, during which actress and civil rights advocate
Ruby Dee read from King's "
Beyond Vietnam" speech. The gallery also exhibited and represents Adelman's photographs of New York artists, including Andy Warhol,
Roy Lichtenstein,
Tom Wesselmann,
James Rosenquist,
Robert Indiana,
Adolph Gottlieb, other artists and social photographic essays. On March 20, 2017, the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division officially acquired the Bob Adelman photographic archives which included the full spectrum of his work from his famed Civil Rights captures to his less celebrated pornographic bondage images. The archive includes approximately 50,000 prints and 525,000 image negatives and slides. ==Personal life==