American Royalty: The Kennedys, Fashion & Celebrity, Photographs by Mark Shaw showcases timeless images of John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy. The Museum of Art exhibition will be the first museum show to exclusively feature the critically acclaimed work of Mark Shaw. Museum staff worked with the Monroe Gallery of Photography, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Mark Shaw Photographic Archives to select the 50 prints in the exhibition, which can only be seen in Utica. On exhibit through May 4, 2014.
Showing posts with label #JFK50. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #JFK50. Show all posts
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Thursday, November 28, 2013
The LIFE Photograpers Opening Reception Friday, Nov. 29, 5 - 7 PM
Alfred Eisenstaedt ©Time Inc., President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., 1961. Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography
Via Photograph Magazine Newsletter
Looking Back at Camelot: On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the country is remembering and paying its respects. At the Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, The LIFE Photographers opens November 29, an exhibition concurrent with the publication of LIFE: The Day Kennedy Died: 50 Years Later LIFE Remembers the Man and the Moment. LIFE photographers had unusual access to the Kennedy family, and their photographs no doubt helped create the mystique surrounding the family. LIFE editor Richard Stolley will be at a reception and book-signing at the opening Friday, November 29, 5 - 7 pm.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
To Do Friday: The LIFE Photographers
| ©Bill Eppridge: John Lennon on the train to New York from Washington after the Beatles' concert at Washington Coliseum, Feb. 11, 1964 | |
Via The Santa Fe Reporter
Monroe’s latest celebrates some of the most striking images of our time—and the men behind them.
President John F Kennedy’s funeral procession, Japanese surrendering on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, John Lennon unwinding on train trip from Washington, DC to New York. These are some of the iconic photographs celebrated in LIFE magazine during photojournalism’s golden age.
That mythical era might be long gone, but the poignancy of those images lives on in Monroe Gallery of Photography’s The LIFE Photographers, which opens on Friday.
“The exhibition of more than 50 photographs includes iconic moments in our collective history and indelible photographs of everyday life,” the gallery’s Michelle Monroe tells SFR.
Displaying images that are now steeped in the American conscience, the opening coincides with a presentation of the book signing of The Day Kennedy Died and a signing by Richard Stolley, the man responsible for securing the Zapruder film for LIFE.
“LIFE magazine photographers had unparalleled access to John and Jacqueline Kennedy, from even before they were married,” Monroe continues. “The exhibit features a special selection of well-known historical Kennedy photographs and several seldom-seen, rare images of the now-famous Kennedy mystique that was Camelot.”
The LIFE Photographers +
the day kennedy died signing
5-7 pm Friday, Nov. 29. Free.
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800
the day kennedy died signing
5-7 pm Friday, Nov. 29. Free.
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800
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Wednesday, November 20, 2013
A Day in the LIFE
Fifty years after JFK’s assassination, Hal Wingo looks back
Via The Santa Fe Reporter
Former senior editor of LIFE magazine, Hal Wingo remembers the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963 vividly. He was working as a reporter in the publication’s Big Apple headquarters and was walking back from lunch.
Wingo recalls how the Time & Life Building, one of the four original structures in Rockefeller Center, was one of few tall buildings on the block. Its neighbors were all “itty-bitty” two to three story-tall buildings filled mostly with electronic retailers selling radios and black and white TV’s.
“I was walking back up Sixth Avenue and I noticed all these people standing in front of the windows of these shops,” Wingo says. “I got up close and I saw they were all watching this broadcast saying the president had been shot.”
He then set “the world speed record from 47th to 50th Street,” and upon arriving at his workplace, was immediately dispatched to Washington DC.
“When Dick and I talk about these things, I’ve always said that every person with a memory that reaches back that far can stand up and tell us exactly where they were and exactly how they heard that the president had been killed.” He pauses and takes a sip of coffee. “Our story is no different, it’s just that we were closer to it, but everyone shared the experience.”
Dick is Wingo’s colleague Richard Stolley, who at the time served as the magazine’s Los Angeles bureau chief. Stolley was alerted of the news via AP Teletype and not an hour later was on a plane to Dallas working on a tip that a local businessman by the name “Za-proo-dur” had captured that precise moment of the president’s motorcade on film.
In a swift move and amongst cutthroat competition, Stolley secured the 26-second clip he calls “the most famous home movie in American history” for $50,000.
“He’s the man,” Wingo gushes. “There’s no getting around that’s the most important thing LIFE ever published.”
The pair, who later teamed up to launch People magazine, and who, by a twist of unrelated events moved to Santa Fe, join forces on Friday for a presentation at the Lensic titled From Zapruder to Taskim Square: Media and Culture in the 21st Century.
The intention, Wingo says, is “to turn this—from just a total reflection—to thinking about where are we now and where do we go from here, in terms of events in the future and how they get handled, reported and treated by the media.”
A week later, Stolley is set to sign copies of LIFE: The Day Kennedy Died at Monroe Gallery.
“We’re in that pivotal sphere, I think, in terms of everything being different,” Wingo says. “We live in a world dominated by Julian Assange and Snowden. There are no secrets; it’s just a different world—a totally different world.”
With today’s ever-competing 24-hour news channels and sharing at the push of a button, Wingo notes how the information panorama has changed dramatically since the faithful Texas afternoon.
“People stayed glued to their TV sets all weekend and never once saw a single picture of what happened, because it was in the Zapruder film only and that came out in LIFE magazine on Monday.”
At the time, Wingo says, the move to pull an already printed product and replace it with a revised one was nothing short of Herculean.
“You gotta remember, the assassination occurred on a Friday,” he says. “The magazine had closed on the Wednesday before that. We were done; it was on trucks being sent out around the country.”
So, the issue featuring Heisman Trophy-winner Roger Staubach was pulled and replaced over the weekend. Short on time, the magazine published the film’s stills in black and white.
“What you see in that issue of LIFE are grainy, black and white frames and you think, ‘Really?’ but that’s it, that’s the record,” Wingo says.
Accidentally, the move created the need for instant information in the pre-Internet age. “It was the first time that had ever happened and from that day forward, the reading public expected that if something big happened, you’d get it in LIFE next Monday.”
He chuckles, “We put enormous pressure on ourselves in the process. It was a tuning point, both for what were doing, and I think, in many ways, for the way that people in the country looked at the events of our time.”
In what now would be considered the definition of an atypical media move, the magazine withheld publishing the infamous frame 313—which shows the exact moment the president’s crown is blown away—out of respect to the family and the American people.
“Can you imagine that happening today? Number one, if anybody got killed in any kind of public setting like that, there’d be 10,000 of these things,” Wingo says, picking up his cell phone. “Frankly, if we’d had those back then, we wouldn’t have as many conspiracy theories as we have today, because there’d be much more evidence. But back then, there was only one record.”
As a matter of perspective, Wingo considers the presidential assassination “more personal” in the American fiber than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
“9/11 was beyond imagination in its horror,” he reflects. “But not personal in the way that losing this one person who so many people admired and attached great hope to.”
FROM ZAPRUDER TO TASKIM SQUARE 7 pm Friday, Nov. 22. Free.
988-7050
LIFE: THE DAY KENNEDY DIED SIGNING 5-7 pm Friday, Nov. 29. Free.
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Ave., 992-0800
Related:
Sunday, November 17, 2013
“I had no idea what else was available, but I knew Life had to have it.”
Photo exhibit
• Exhibit opening of Life Photographers featuring a special selection of photographs of John F. Kennedy
• Exhibit opening of Life Photographers featuring a special selection of photographs of John F. Kennedy
• 5-7 p.m. Nov. 29 Includes book signing with Richard Stolley
©Time Inc.
Related:
Former 'LIFE' magazine photographer Bob Gomel is sharing his memories of the president and the day he was laid to rest
Former senior editor of LIFE magazine, Hal Wingo remembers the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963 vividly
The Hartford Courant: JFK Assassination: The Zapruder Film, Life Magazine And A Gentleman's Deal
LIFE photographer Bob Gomel Got Closer Than He Wanted to JFK Funeral
'Life' photographer calls JFK his most charismatic subject
'Life' photographer calls JFK his most charismatic subject
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Bob Gomel got closer than he wanted to JFK’s funeral
Bob Gomel Courtesy: Erin Powers / Powers MediaWorks
Via The Houston Chronicle
Posted on November 14, 2013 |
As a Life magazine photographer in the ’60s, Bob Gomel saw some of the most pivotal moments in pop culture history through the lens of his Nikon.
A hallway in his Memorial home is lined with crisp, perfectly matted and framed shots that he snapped of Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles, Richard Nixon, and Dustin Hoffman. Each photo comes with a rich story from Gomel that leaves the listener with a perma-grin.
But it is Gomel’s most celebrated subject, President John F. Kennedy, that has brought him the most notoriety — and the most sadness. Capturing the funeral of a man he had grown personally close to was not in his plan.
This fall he’s been a busy man, recounting a week of his life 50 years ago, a week that he wishes he wouldn’t have played such a small, but every important role in.
Gomel was on a team of Life photographers tasked with capturing every step of Kennedy’s funeral in November 1963. Gomel was all of 30 years old, thrust into an American nightmare, and assigned to document it all for folks at home. The somber proceedings threw a dark shroud over the country, but Gomel had to keep snapping photos. The fact that the slain president actually knew his name after years of Life coverage made the situation all the more harder for Gomel, who had been orbiting around Kennedy since before he was even elected president.
There was an afternoon late in 1960 when then President-elect Kennedy, Gomel, and another photog spent a few rather normal hours together that he’ll always remember with great pride.
“Kennedy was working and living in a brownstone in Georgetown picking out his cabinet for his first term,” says Gomel, who was waiting to capture the first shots of newly appointed cabinet members. It was slow going some days. Men in suits would come in and out, with little or no word to the press.
“There was just two of us left outside on a cold, dreary Saturday afternoon, so Kennedy invited us inside to watch the Army-Navy football game,” he says. That other man was noted Washington news photog James Atherton, no slouch in his own right. Atherton passed away in 2011.
They went inside and TV trays were brought out. Kennedy, Gomel, Atherton, and some Kennedy staffers ate steak and baked potatoes and watched the game.
“The next thing I remember is Jim waking me up, telling me that Navy won and that I fell asleep on the president,” Gomel says. From then on Kennedy would always have fun with him about it.
Gomel’s photographic journey began at 11 years old, when he delivered groceries on his bicycle for one hot summer in the Bronx, making just enough cash for a Circoflex camera. It cost him $88 — not a small chunk of change in 1944 — but what he wanted more than anything was a camera of his own that didn’t belong to his parents. He wanted to explore the world with a lens, even if it was just the Bronx.
After graduating from New York University, a hitch as a Navy pilot during the tail-end of the Korean War only made him yearn for a life behind the lens even more.
Gomel left Life at the end of 1969 and opened up his own studio in Manhattan. He did commercial work for the likes of Audi, Shell, Pan Am, Volkswagen, and Merrill Lynch before heading to Houston in the late ’70s to to take part in the oil boom.
Now 80 years old, the Manhattan-born, Bronx-raised and proud Houstonian of nearly 40 years hasn’t slowed down a bit, and neither has his trigger finger. When I spoke with him on a sunny afternoon this week, he was giddily telling me about one of his upcoming, month-long photography trips to South India.
“Houston was so exciting at that time, there was so much going on,” he says. “You could work 8 days a week here.”
The hubbub surrounding the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy means that there are new documentaries, news packages, and online and print stories to resurrect old feelings. Men like Gomel that were on the front lines of history aren’t so cynical about the situation.
“What’s troubling me is the cockamamie work of people trying to capitalize on the anniversary with their assassination theories,” says Gomel. “I have to concur with a preponderance of analysts that Oswald acted alone.”
He was in New York when he found out about the assassination in Dallas. He showed up to work at the Life offices to find that everyone who was on staff was ordered to leave immediately for Washington.
“There was no time to even pack a toothbrush,” he says.
He got into Washington, D.C., on the morning of Nov. 23, just in time to arrive at the White House to see the president’s body being brought back home. From then on, Gomel was shooting everything in front of him.
The mood that week still makes him shudder. The stun in everyone’s eyes, the disbelief and shock was surreal.
“We hadn’t experienced anything like that in our lifetime; it was a series of shocks. It was more than we could comprehend at one time,” he says.
Couriers picked up film every hour to fly it back to New York to get it developed. Sleep was a rarity.
Gomel’s shot of Kennedy’s casket lying in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda as thousands upon thousands filed in to pay their respects is haunting in its simplicity and scope. The blue hue came from some intervention from the man upstairs, he says. He had been down on the main floor but decided to explore the potential of the balcony above. He found a door that had access and he went up there.
“It was just the right time of day to capture a little bit of light coming through.”
He would shoot from nearly the same vantage point for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s funeral in March 1969, but from much higher in the rotunda.
The graveside services for Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 25 featured dozens of heads of state from around the world. There was Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie I, Chancellor Ludwig Wilhelm Erhard, and Gomel, somehow right in the mix. He wasn’t exactly supposed to be that close to the world’s leaders.
“I learned only recently at a Life magazine reunion that we didn’t even have credentials for Arlington National Cemetery,” he laughs.
The Life staff had rented a limousine for the funeral and were accidentally put into the official motorcade with all the heads of state.
“I had a front row seat,” Gomel says. His photo, with de Gaulle solemnly saluting the casket of Kennedy and the others looking on in reverence, shows just how packed Kennedy’s service was. He estimates there are 60-plus dignitaries in the photo. Somewhere there is a list of everyone shown.
Getting the best shots sometimes had to come by hook or by crook, on boss’s orders.
“We had to find a way to get pictures. We had an admonition from our editor to not come back with just excuses,” he says.
During the viewing and funeral, Gomel found himself putting aside his personal relationship with Kennedy for work. He was 100 percent concerned with reporting it and capturing all the details with his camera.
“I had to disconnect from my association with the president and the fact he knew my name,” he says.
Gomel was in Houston with the president when he made his famous Moon Race speech at Rice University in September 1962. You can spy the photog in the background of a picture of Kennedy here in town, too.
“We choose to go to the moon,” Kennedy said that day. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
“I can remember it clearly today,” said Gomel. “He has his fist clenched on the podium, and his delivery was so dynamic. He made all of us believe this was possible and achievable.”
Gomel captured a candid shot of Kennedy climbing out of a space capsule at NASA, which he’s extremely proud of. It’s in his home gallery, and one of the first photos you see when you come into his house. It’s symbolic of the country finally making it to the moon, just as Kennedy wanted.
After the 50th anniversary specials and tributes die down after Nov. 22, Gomel will continue to reflect on what he was a part of all those years ago.
“I wish I didn’t have to have that experience. I have gotten a small degree of fame from it, but I wish it came from another source.”
Bob Gomel's photographs are featured in the forthcoming exhibition "The Life Photographers", November 29 - January 24, 2014, Monroe Gallery of Photography (Santa Fe). During the opening reception on Nov. 29, Richard B. Stolley will be signing copies of the new LIFE book "The Day Kennedy Died, 5 - 7 PM.
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