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...

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...

James G. Lott, a longtime Seattle Times photographer, died in early July of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 52. Lott's award-winning work was marked by a compassion and empathy for the less fortunate, and his coworkers have created the Jimi Lott Scholarship through the National Press Photographers Foundation in his honor.

Co-workers remember Lott for his keen eye, boundless energy, willingness to experiment, and ability to capture moments and images that spoke to the heart.

For four consecutive years (1985-1988), he won the Reid Blackburn Memorial Award for outstanding...

After 20 years as executive director of SF Camerawork, Marnie Gillett died Dec. 3, 2004, following a lengthy battle with breast cancer. During her tenure, Gillett established Camerawork as a launching pad for emerging artists. She also was pivotal in helping raise San Francisco’s profile as an art community leading the exploration of the photographic medium.

Before assuming the leadership of Camerawork, Gillett was curator of exhibitions at the University of Arizona’s...

Craig Aurness, known for his work in National Geographic, died Dec. 14, 2004, in Panorama City, Calif. Aurness had been undergoing treatment for lung and anemia complications. He was 58.

The adopted son of James Arness, Aurness grew up on a ranch in Southern California. In the 1970s, he apprenticed with Look magazine photographer Earl Tyson. His first assignment for National Geographic was published in 1978, and he...

Activist and author Susan Sontag died of leukemia on Dec. 28, 2004, at the age of 71. It was Sontag’s third bout with cancer since 1976, a disease that informed much of her writing in the last few decades.

Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, in 1933. Following the death of her father when she was five, the family lived in Arizona and Los Angeles, where her mother married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag.

After graduating from North Hollywood High School at 15, she attended...