Leonard Freed, whose photographs documented the civil rights movement and other scenes of human struggle, died from cancer in New York City last November at the age of 77.

Freed was born Oct. 23, 1929, in Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied art at the New School under Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar, an experience that turned his attention toward photography. After graduation he traveled extensively in Europe and...

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...