Brian Lanker: 1947-2011
Brian Lanker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his black-and-white photo essay on childbirth in 1973, passed away on March 13 at the age of 63.
Lanker’s photojournalism career began with small-town newspapers, including The Phoenix Gazette, which he joined at the age of 18, and The Topeka Capital-Journal...
Getty, Time Unveil Life.com
Life magazine's 160 years of photo archives became available, for free, on March 31 after a two-year project to digitize the publication's expansive photo collection.
Life.com, the online photo archive created by Getty Images and Time Inc., launched with more than 7 million images and plans to add 3,000 new images every day. The database features images from both the Life and Getty photo databases. The expansive collection includes unseen galleries, such as photos from the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination; only 3 percent of the images have been previously viewed by the public...
Life Archives Made Available on Google
Google and Time Inc. have teamed up to bring more than 10 million images from Life magazine to users around the world. The free image portal contains collections from Life's Photo Archive, including some of the most iconic works of the 20th century by photojournalists such as Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith.
Already, millions of Life images are available for viewing via Google Image Search. Once the online project is complete in the next few months, the archive will be among the largest professional photography collections on the web and one of the largest photo-scanning projects ever undertaken...
Burt Glinn, 1926-2008
Award-winning photographer Burt Glinn, whose images of Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba won him international renown, died April 9 at age 82 in Southampton, N.Y., after suffering from kidney failure and pneumonia.
Glinn was born Burton Samuel Glinn in Pittsburgh in 1925 and later served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946. He earned degrees in history and literature from Harvard University in 1949 and went on to work for Life magazine as a photo assistant from 1949 to 1950.
He became one of the first American members of Magnum Photo in 1951, along with...
Yale Joel, 1909-2006
Former Life magazine photographer Yale Joel recently died of cardiac arrest in New York City at the age of 87.
Joel began his photographic career in 1938, when he was 19 years old, going on to serve as a combat photographer for the Army Signal Corps in World War II. He joined the original Life staff in 1947, working at various times through the magazine's Paris, Washington, Boston and New York offices.
During the next decade, he twice won the...
Arnold Newman, 1918-2006
Photographer Arnold Newman, known for his portraits of artists and politicians, passed away in early June at the age of 88. Newman, who had been recovering from a stroke, died of a heart attack.
Newman's style was known as environmental portraiture, placing his subjects in the context of their life and work. Among his most famous portraits are those of composer Igor Stravinsky, Andy Warhol, Alfried Krupp, Pablo Picasso, Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Among his many honors, Newman was voted one of the world's 10 best photographers in a...
Catherine Leroy, 1945-2006
French photojournalist Catherine Leroy, who covered the Vietnam War as well as many other global conflicts, died of cancer on July 8. She was 60.
In 1966, at the age of 21, Leroy packed up her Leica and bought a one-way ticket to Vietnam. While photographing the combat, she was wounded with a Marine unit in the DMZ, and was captured by the North Vietnamese Army during the 1968 Tet offensive. Her views of the North Vietnamese Army in action landed her a Life cover.
In 1972, Leroy shot and directed "Operation Last Patrol," a film about...
Gordon Parks, 1912-2006
Photojournalist Gordon Parks, known for his work with Life magazine as well as for directing films, died at his home in New York City on March 7, at the age of 93.
Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kan., in 1912, the youngest of 15 children. In 1941, he became the first photographer to receive a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. He joined the staff of the Farm Security Administration and, later, the Office of War Information, whose combined collection of documentary photographs is among the...
Stanford Acquires Menuez Collection
The Stanford University Libraries have acquired the complete archive of photographer Douglas Menuez, which encompasses his editorial photojournalism and fine-art documentary work as well as recent advertising projects. Most significant, the library believes, is the inclusion of more than 250,000 negatives documenting the growth of Silicon Valley.
Menuez's rise to prominence began as an intern at the Washington Post, followed by assignments for national publications including Time, Newsweek and Life. Through the course of his career, his social documentary work covered the famine in Ethiopia, the destruction of the Amazon, the AIDS crisis, drug wars and several presidential campaigns. He won numerous awards...
Hy Peskin, 1915-2005
Hy Peskin, sports photographer and philanthropist, died of kidney disease June 3 at the age of 89.
Peskin, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., first entered the world of journalism by selling newspapers as a boy. He later became a sportswriter for the New York Daily Mirror.
After a stint in the Marines from 1943 to 1944, Peskin became interested in stop-action color photography...