The best-known of his students is filmmaker Ken Burns. “He was an extraordinary teacher,’’ Burns said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
“The teaching was not so much the work in class - though his classes were fantastic - as the work of life. More often than not, it was when you went with him to pick up his dry cleaning in Northampton and he talked about the look of a woman we passed on a porch or the play of light on a man standing next to a building, that’s where and when we learned.’’
Burns spoke for many students who experienced the vibrancy of Mr. Liebling’s personality, the power of his work, and the openness of his teaching.
Asked in a 2004 Globe profile to describe his teaching philosophy, Mr. Liebling said, “Seeing and encountering the world - that was it. We did it with photo; we did it with film. Take the camera, go look… .
“I never thwarted a student’s own desires. I would bring them what I thought was important. But if they came around and they said, ‘I’m a Pentecostal, and I’ve got to photograph in tongues, I’d say: ‘Yeah, really? All right, let’s see how we can do it.’ … I accepted their experience and their growth and just hoped they’d listen to what I kept putting in front of them.’’
Part of what made Mr. Liebling such an effective teacher was his ability to unite practice with instruction. Himself the recipient of two Guggenheims and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, Mr. Liebling has photographs in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among many other institutions.
“A wonderful photographer,’’ John Szarkowski, the late curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, said of Mr. Liebling in 2004. “The work has never been flamboyant. It’s always been under control, beautifully made, and very deeply felt, without being in any way hyperbolic.”
