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...

Mountaineer and aerial photographer Bradford Washburn died of heart failure Jan. 11 in Lexington, Mass.

Washburn was born in 1910 in Cambridge, Mass. In 1933, he graduated from Harvard University and served as an instructor at Harvard's Institute of Geographical Exploration from 1935 until 1942.

Throughout his 60-year career, he traveled extensively, and his aerial images of peaks and glaciers...

Bruce Fraser, a pioneer in the field of digital photography, died of lung cancer last December at his home in San Francisco.

Fraser was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1954. He became interested in photography at an early age, and was introduced to a precursor of Photoshop, BarneyScan XP, in the late 1980s. His enthusiasm for the potential of digital photography led him to become involved in...

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...

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...

Joe Rosenthal, made famous by his World War II photograph of soldiers raising an American flag over Iwo Jima, died Aug. 20 at age 94 in Novato, Calif.

His iconic Iwo Jima image, taken with a Speed Graphic camera set at 1/400th of a second on Feb. 23, 1945, is considered one of the most famous and reproduced photographs of all time, earning Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize.

Rosenthal, who was born in Washington, D.C., moved to San Francisco in 1930 and found work as a photographer...

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...

Thomas J. Abercrombie, a photographer for National Geographic for nearly 40 years, died April 3 of complications from open-heart surgery at the age of 75.

Abercrombie was born in Stillwater, Minn., in 1930. In addition to taking photographs on seven continents, he was the first journalist to reach the South Pole in 1957, one year after joining the National Geographic staff.

Abercrombie was the first person to win both the Newspaper Photographer of the Year (1954) and the Magazine Photographer of the Year (1959) awards. After retiring from National Geographic...

Adolph Gasser, founder of San Francisco's venerable photography store, Adolph Gasser, Inc., died March 23 at the age of 94.

Gasser was born in San Francisco in 1912 to Swiss and German immigrants, Adolph and Marie Gasser. He began his photographic career as a camera repairman and opened his own repair shop in 1936. In addition to simple repairs, Gasser designed custom parts and worked with optics in still and motion picture equipment. Among his clientele were Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and other...

Noted photographer Michael A. W. Evans, an early developer of software systems for cataloging photography collections, died of cancer on Dec. 1, 2005, at his home in Atlanta. He was 61.

The son of Canadian diplomats, Evans was born in St. Louis and spent much of his childhood abroad. His 20-year photojournalism and picture-editing career began at the Port Hope Evening Guide newspaper in Ontario, Canada, in 1959, when he was 15.

He also worked for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and...