New Exhibit and Gallery Conversation: Bob Gomel - Classics

 BOB GOMEL: CLASSICS

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce a special exhibition of photographs celebrating Bob Gomel’s recent 90th birthday with several never-before-see photographs from three of his most iconic assignments for LIFE magazine: photographs of The Beatles, Muhammad Ali, and President John F. Kennedy.

The exhibition opens with a Gallery conversation with Bob Gomel on Friday, October 6. Talk begins promptly at 5:30, seated is limited and RSVP is essential; contact the Gallery for live Zoom registration. The exhibition continues through November 19, 2023.

The photographs of Bob Gomel put you in a diner with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X after Ali’s defeat of Sonny Liston, poolside with the Beatles, and in the audience at Rice University as President John F. Kennedy delivered his historic “We choose to go to the Moon” speech. This exhibit explores three classic assignments for LIFE magazine with many never-before-seen photographs of The Beatles, Muhammad Ali, and President John F. Kennedy.

 “I had no idea the 60s would be so iconic. It seemed quite ordinary at the time, but looking back on it now, I realize how fortunate I was.”

From the tumult of battle to the glamour of movie stars, from the wonders of nature to the coronation of kings, queens, and presidents, the work of LIFE photographers is as much a history of American photojournalism as it is a history of the changing face of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. On the pages of LIFE, through the images captured by these masters, the eyes of a nation were opened as never before to a changing world. 

The triumphs and tragedies of the 1960s provided photographer Bob Gomel and his LIFE magazine colleague’s extraordinary opportunities to advance American photojournalism. "LIFE was the world's best forum for photojournalists. We were encouraged to push creative and technical boundaries. There was no better place to work in that extraordinary decade." 

Bob Gomel was born (1933) and raised in New York City. After serving four years in the U.S. Navy, he was promptly offered a job at the Associated Press. But by then, he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do. “I just felt one picture wasn’t sufficient to tell a story,” he explains. “I was interested in exploring something in depth. And, of course, the mecca was Life magazine.”He turned down the offer from AP, and began working for LIFE in 1959, producing many memorable images. When LIFE ceased being a weekly in the early 1970s, he began making photographs for other major magazines. Also in the 1970s, he branched out into advertising photography. Among other accounts, he helped introduce Merrill Lynch’s Bullish on America campaign.

Bob says, “Each time I raised a camera to my eye I wondered how to make a viewer say, “wow.” What followed were the use of double exposures to tell a more complete story; placing remote cameras where no human being could be; adapting equipment to reveal what could not ordinarily be captured on film. My goal with people was to penetrate the veneer, to reveal the true personality or character. The ideal was sometimes mitigated by circumstances, a lack of time or access. But more often than not what the mind conceived could be translated into successful photographic images. Life Magazine in the 60s sold 8,000,000 copies a week. It was a great honor to be a part of that information highway.” 

An Evening with Bob Gomel and screening of the film Bob Gomel: Eyewitness

Via MATCH Houston 

When history was made, Bob Gomel was there.

Bob Gomel: Eyewitness is a documentary that examines the stories behind the stories of some of the most significant events in the 20th century. Hear and see the history unfold from the perspective of a legendary LIFE Magazine photographer. Join us for An Evening with Bob Gomel - The theatrical premier of the documentary Bob Gomel: Eyewitness, including 14 additional minutes of previously unseen material. There will be a Q/A session with Bob Gomel and director David Scarbrough following the showing. 

Thursday, July 20 at 7:30 PM

Q & A Immediately following the screening

with Bob Gomel and David Scarbrough 

Tickets: $10

How the documentary came to be:

Bob Gomel and David Scarbrough share a love of storytelling through photography.

During the past decade the two men and their spouses, Sandy Gomel and Mary Scarbrough, became friends. Bob’s shot of The Beatles in poolside lounge chairs hangs in the Scarbroughs’ home. It was Mary’s birthday gift to David for his 60th birthday.

David said, “The history Bob witnessed is important. So are the effort and creativity necessary to make extraordinary images of these historic moments. Many of the images are made even more powerful by Bob’s perspective on how they were created. ”David convinced Bob to reflect on his work for LIFE magazine in the 1960s and his subsequent career.

Over dinner one evening, the Scarbroughs proposed making a documentary of Bob’s career. Bob said, “David offered a compelling idea to consider. After a few days, I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

The documentary project came together quickly. A small studio was set up in Scarbrough’s retail computer electronics shop in Houston. Sessions were shot on Sundays when the shop was closed and outside noise was minimal. As many filmmakers do now, David chose to record the videos in 4K on two iPhones in a two-shot setup. A MacBook Pro and Adobe Premier Pro were be used to edit the video.

The recordings began with a discussion of the Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston fights. The project quickly gained momentum as David executed his vision for the project, and the stories of more of the epic photos came to life.

“The challenge was to balance Bob’s unique ability to talk about the images and history, and to ensure the viewer remained immersed in the image itself,” David said. “I hope the viewer can briefly live in the moment of the images.”

Bob said, “The decade of the 1960s was historically powerful. We witnessed so much — from the terrific to the terrible. I’m grateful that David remains interested in the history of the 1960s and that his documentary helped share my perspective on the extraordinary events of the decade and on my life as a photographer.”

A headline in a recent Albuquerque Journal article read: “Bob Gomel’s Photographs Compel Even after 40 Years.” The renowned LIFE photographer has documented many of the great moments and personalities of contemporary history. Articles and books have chronicled Bob’s adventures, including Art Buckwald’s “Leaving Home”, Yoko Ono’s “Memories of John Lennon”, “Arnold Palmer: A Personal Journey,” “Malcolm X”, by Thulani Davis, and Dick Stolley’s “Our Century in Pictures”. His work is exhibited at The Monroe Gallery, Santa Fe.

Bob is a founding member of the Houston chapter of ASMP, the American Society of Media Photographers. ASMP is the leading professional organization for photographers and videographers working in the visual marketplace. The core mission of ASMP is to advocate, educate, and provide community for image makers — fostering thriving careers, a strong sense of professional ethics, and an unshakable belief in the power of images.

Forthcoming exhibition and Gallery Talk with Bob Gomel: October 6, 2023. Details soon!

Bob Gomel : Eyewitness - When history was made, he was there

Via Bob Gomel Eyewitness

Bob Gomel and David Scarbrough share a love of storytelling through photography.

During the past decade, the two men and their spouses, Sandy Gomel and Mary Scarbrough, became friends. Bob’s shot of The Beatles in poolside lounge chairs hangs in the Scarbroughs’ home. It was Mary’s birthday gift to David for his 60th birthday.

David said, “The history Bob witnessed is important. So are the effort and creativity necessary to make extraordinary images of these historic moments. Many of the images are made even more powerful by Bob’s perspective on how they were created.”

David convinced Bob to reflect on his work for LIFE magazine in the 1960s and his subsequent career. Over dinner one evening, the Scarbroughs proposed making a documentary of Bob’s career. Bob said, “David offered a compelling idea to consider. After a few days, I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

The documentary project came together quickly. A small studio was set up in Scarbrough’s retail computer electronics shop in Houston. Sessions were shot on Sundays when the shop was closed and outside noise was minimal. As many filmmakers do now, David chose to record the videos in 4K on two iPhones in a two-shot setup. A MacBook Pro and Adobe Premier Pro would be used to edit the video.

The recordings began with a discussion of the Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston fights. The project quickly gained momentum, as David executed his vision for the project, and the stories of more of the epic photos came to life.

“The challenge was to balance Bob’s unique ability to talk about the images and history, and to ensure the viewer remained immersed in the image itself,” David said. “I hope the viewer can briefly live in the moment of the images.”

Bob said, “The decade of the 1960s was historically powerful. We witnessed so much — from the terrific to the terrible. I’m grateful that David remains interested in the history of the 1960s and that his documentary helped share my perspective on the extraordinary events of the decade and on my life as a photographer.”

Ray Macland, the LIFE Picture Editor in 1960, hired a group of young photographers he dubbed “The Young Lions”. There were 5 of us - 

Farrell Grehan, Ken Hyman, Bill Ray, John Loengard & myself.

"With John Loengard's passing on May 24, 2020, that leaves just me."

Bob Gomel : Eyewitness is now available on Amazon Prime

Bill Ray shot some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th Century

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of famed LIFE magazine photographer Bill Ray.

Via the NY Post
By Isabel Vincent

January 18, 2020

Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at 

Madison Square Garden in May 1962

When Private Elvis Presley shipped out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard on his way to his military tour of duty in West Germany in September 1958, the US Army’s brass band played “Hound Dog” to honor the King of Rock and Roll.

“And the captains and the majors helped him with his bags!” said Bill Ray, the former LIFE Magazine photographer who captured the moment.

Ray, who died earlier this month at his home on the Upper West Side, shot some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th century.

There is his photograph of a sultry Marilyn Monroe in a shimmering, nude-colored dress, its plunging bare back accentuating her curves as she sang a breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in May 1962. Three months after Ray shot the picture on stage from behind the movie star, the troubled sex symbol would be dead of an overdose. Kennedy was assassinated a year after that, and the famous dress, designed by Hollywood costume designer Jean Louis, sold at auction a few years ago for nearly $5 million.

Ray, who worked for LIFE in Los Angeles, Paris and Beverly Hills, shot The Beatles when they first arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, partied with Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate a year before the pregnant actress was brutally murdered by Charles Manson in 1969. He was a regular presence on hundreds of Hollywood movie sets, photographing Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and Natalie Wood, among others.

“Steve McQueen once told me that he had to have sex five times a day,” said Ray about the “Bullitt” star at a 2009 presentation of his greatest work at the Coffee House Club in midtown, where he had been a member for more than 50 years. “I was too stunned to ask Steve what happens if you don’t.”

William Ray was born in Shelby, Nebraska, a windswept village of 626 about two hours west of Omaha. Ray was the youngest of four children of a prosperous lumber merchant and his artist wife. He developed such a passion for photography that by the time he was 11, he was already a member of the Omaha Camera Club and had his own professional darkroom at home. He got his first staff job as a 17-year-old at the Lincoln Star Journal newspaper.

“The city editor had a smoke and hired me on the spot,” he said.

After a photographic workshop in Hannibal, Missouri, where he impressed the faculty with a series of photographs about the local barbershop, Ray was hired by LIFE magazine and sent to New York in 1957.

“I wanted to live in New York City since I saw Fred [Astaire] dance with Ginger [Rogers] in Central Park,” he said.

For years, Ray and Marlys Ray, his wife of nearly 62 years, lived in a sprawling apartment across from Central Park where he was a regular on the tennis courts and an avid bird watcher. On January 8, the couple took a long walk in the park, feeding a few cardinals along the way, “and, best of all, saw the rising nearly full moon with a kiss (one of our silly rituals),” said Marlys Ray, a partner in her husband’s photo business.

“It was his best day in a long time.”

Ray died hours later of a heart attack. He was 83.

"exhibition currently on view at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, pays tribute to one of the most acclaimed photojournalists of the last century"

Grey Villet, A portrait of LIFE in America

May 15, 2017 -

United States , written by L'Oeil de la Photographie

Fidel Castro, Hometown Greetings, 1959 ©Grey Villet

Born in South Africa, Grey Villet traveled America and the world for LIFE magazine like an observant explorer, mapping its emotional contours in the faces and lives of its people. His in-depth, personal studies of the American scene of the 1950s through the 1970’s illuminated the complex reality of those years with a truth that, in his own words, were “as real as real could get.” His images of presidents and revolutionaries, sports heroes, and everyday people struggling for their rights tell an emotional and compelling story of an era that shaped the present. This exhibition currently on view at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, pays tribute to one of the most acclaimed photojournalists of the last century.

Slideshow here.



Grey Villet, A portrait of LIFE in America
May 5 — June 25, 2017
Monroe Gallery
112 Don Gaspar Ave
Santa Fe, NM 87501
USA

http://www.monroegallery.com/

Gallerist Sidney Monroe discusses legendary photographer Mark Shaw

Kennedy family on beach, Hyannis Port, ©Mark Shaw/mptvimages.com
Courtesy Monroe Gallery

 
Special Event

American Royalty: The Kennedys, Fashion & Celebrity

Saturday, March 1, 20144 pm — 7 pm

Museum of Art

$5 MWPAI Members
$15 General Admission

Lecture • 4 p.m.
Mark Shaw:
The Kennedy Years and Beyond
Sidney Monroe
Monroe Gallery of Photography
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Followed by Exhibition Viewing

Reception • 5 to 7 p.m.
Festive Attire, Cash Bar

 

Gallerist Sidney Monroe discusses legendary photographer Mark Shaw, best known for his intimate portraits of the Kennedys (before and during John F. Kennedy’s presidency) and as a leading fashion photographer, having worked for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and others. Shaw worked for LIFE magazine from 1952 to 1968, shooting 27 covers and almost 100 stories with subjects ranging from Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly to the fashions of Christian Dior.

 

310 Genesee Street Utica, NY 13502
Phone: (315) 797-0000

“LIFE magazine was a great success..."

“LIFE magazine was a great success. If a man hadn't seen a picture of a native in New Guinea, well, we brought him a picture of a native of New Guinea. We went into the homes of princes and Presidents and showed the public how they lived. The great thing about working with LIFE was that I was given all the support and money and time, whatever was required, to do almost any kind of work I wanted to do, anywhere in the world. It was like having a grant, a Guggenheim grant, but permanently." --John Dominis

The LIFE Photographers continues through Januray 26, 2014

Related:    “I had no idea what else was available, but I knew Life had to have it.” 

                  Bob Gomel got closer than he wanted to JFK’s funeral

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 | By Craig Hlavaty


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.

50 Years Ago Today: 'Ich bin ein Berliner'

John Dominis: President John F. Kennedy looking over Berlin wall to Eastern Sector, 1963

©Time Inc.

Via BBC  1963: Kennedy: 'Ich bin ein Berliner'

The US President, John F Kennedy, made a ground-breaking speech in Berlin offering American solidarity to the citizens of West Germany.

A crowd of 120,000 Berliners gathered in front of the Schöneberg Rathaus (City Hall) to hear President Kennedy speak.

They began gathering in the square long before he was due to arrive, and when he finally appeared on the podium they gave him an ovation of several minutes.

The president had just returned from a visit on foot to one of the Berlin Wall's most notorious crossing points, Checkpoint Charlie.

He was watched from the other side of the border by small groups of East Berliners unable even to wave because of the presence of large groups of the East German People's Police.

In an impassioned speech, the president told them West Berlin was a symbol of freedom in a world threatened by the Cold War.

"Two thousand years ago," he told the crowd, "the proudest boast in the world was 'civis Romanus sum'.

"Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"

"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," he continued. "But we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in."

His speech was punctuated throughout by rapturous cheers of approval.

He ended on the theme he had begun with:

"All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"

After the speech, the mayor of West Berlin, Willi Brandt, spoke out for the citizens of East Germany, saying they would be brought out in a few days to greet the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, whether they wanted to or not.

"But they would much rather be with us, freely gathered here," he said.

"We tell them, we will not give up. Berlin is true to those behind barbed wire as to fellow countrymen in the West and friends in the whole world."

His words were followed by the tolling of the Freedom Bell from the belfry of the Rathaus in remembrance of those in East Germany.

For the first time that day, the massive crowd fell silent.

50 Years Ago: 1963

Charles Moore:   Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy Walk Toward Their Arrest, Birmingham, Alabama, April 16, 1963

Hank Walker: JFK and RFK, 1960

John and Robert Kennedy, Los Angeles by Hank Walker

© 1960 Time Inc

La Journal de la Photographie has been running a series of excerpts of interviews with several Great Life Photographers. This photograph is a particular favorite of ours.

"At the 1960 Democratic Convention, where everybody was shooting pictures like crazy, I was doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. The morning after Jack was nominated, we went up to his room. The brothers talked very quietly, and Jack told Bobby he wasn’t going to choose Walter Reuther for Vice President. I only made one picture in there, and then I waited outside for Bobby to come out. When he did, he was furious. We were walking back down the stairs, and Bobby was hitting his hand like this, saying “Shit, shit, shit.” You know, he really hated Johnson. "

(Interviewed September 29, 1994. Excerpted from: John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, Boston, A Bullfinch Press Book, 1998)

Acclaimed LIFE photographer Bob Gomel looks back

 

One of his fabled JFK shots. - Courtesy Bob Gomel

 

 

Via The Santa Fe Reporter

October 3, 2012

That's LIFE
Acclaimed photographer Bob Gomel looks back

Enrique Limón

 

Asked what it was like to be a photojournalist for LIFE magazine during its 1960s heyday, Bob Gomel does not hesitate to answer. “It was the mecca,” he says with a combination of excitement and nostalgia.


“In my wildest dreams, I thought about things like that, and it never really occurred to me that I would ever become part of that wonderful, elitist group of photographers,” the renowned photog tells SFR. “There was no place higher that you could aspire to.”


Gomel’s iconic images have stood both the tests of time and digital media: a meta Malcolm X photographing then Cassius Clay inside a Miami diner; JFK examining the first space capsule; candid shots of the Beatles relaxing the day prior to their career-defining Ed Sullivan Show appearance.


“It’s a trip down memory lane,” he says of the images he selected for LIFE in the 1960s, his forthcoming exhibit at Monroe Gallery. “Everybody realizes now, retrospectively, that the people that we photographed all became iconic, [but] we had no idea of their value historically when we were doing it.”


“It’s amazing to me how 50-years-ago images can be still relevant today,” Gomel, who describes his current schedule as still “busy as can be,” continues.


Not bad for a kid from the Bronx who was first captivated by photography at age 10, after admiring a picture his science teacher had shot and hung inside the classroom
.
“[It] was a beautiful sepia-toned print of a cobblestone street with a manhole cover in the middle, and a pigeon on it,” he recalls. “I looked at that thing and thought, ‘My God, that’s just beautiful,’ and I was mesmerized.”


Curious, he joined the “little photo club” at his public school, and his lifetime affair with still images began.


“I got hooked!” he says.


The one thing missing in the equation was convincing his parents to fork over the then-whopping $83.75 to purchase his dream instrument, a Ciro-flex camera.


“It was the first post-World War II camera made in America,” he points out.


His parents didn’t budge, so the young Gomel started a bike route delivering groceries to earn the dough.

“I remember once, in the middle of the winter, driving up the snowy hills with that bike, the front wheel basket loaded, and I slipped and fell over,” Gomel reminisces. “A dozen eggs cracked and so, not knowing what to do, I went home and replaced the broken eggs with ones from my mother’s refrigerator and continued to deliver that order,” he laughs. “It’s really what sticks in your mind [after] all these many years.”

He took over a closet in his family home and turned it into a makeshift darkroom.


“It was a cheap imitation of the German Rolleiflex, but I cut my teeth on that Ciro-flex,” he says of his first camera, adding that because there was no real formal training available, he mastered his craft based on “trial and error.”

Focused, he would later land his dream job at LIFE, where he became a trailblazer implementing now-standard maneuvers like double exposure and camera rigging—like when he took a groundbreaking aerial shot of the casket containing the body of President Dwight D Eisenhower in the US Capitol’s rotunda from 280 feet above ground.

“If you can envision a picture and you haven’t got any immediate idea of how to do it, you seek out ways,” he explains.

His visit to Santa Fe, it turns out, will be something of a class reunion, as both former LIFE managing editor Dick Stolley and former reporter Hal Wingo—the twosome that would later found People magazine—live in town.

“I don’t get a chance to see many of my colleagues because the TIME-LIFE alumni association basically orients interests and activities around New York City—luncheons and what have you,” Gomel, who is now Houston-based, says. “It’s not practical for me to be able to join them on those occasions.”

With one foot in the retirement door and the other still active in sporadic travel photography, Gomel says, he often gets the itch to immerse himself in photojournalism once more. One event that cemented this, he says, was a trip to New York in 2001. After several delays, he flew back home the evening of Sept. 10.

“I was sound asleep the following morning when my friend called me something around 7:30 am and said, ‘Turn on your television set,’” he says. “When I saw what was going on, I realized I was right there a few hours before, and God—it was killing me not to have been able to be a part of that event and that I had just missed it. So the answer to your question, do I miss it? You bet.”


Opening reception with Bob Gomel
Friday, October 5   5 - 7 PM
Exhibition continues through November 8, 2012

Listen to Art Beat radio interview: Life Magazine and photographer Bob Gomel

Worcester Art Museum exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.

 Joseph Louw, South African, about 1945-2004, The Death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lorraine Hotel, Memphis, April 4, 1968, Gelatin silver print, gift of David Davis, 2011.148

 Iconic news photographs of 1960s on view in exhibition at Worcester Art Museum

Via artdaily.org


WORCESTER, MASS.- Worcester Art Museum announces its major fall exhibition, Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation, opened September 29 and on view through February 3, 2013. The exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.

The photographs chronicle world events during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. From disturbing assassinations, the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, the thrill of space exploration, and the lightheartedness of pop culture, this exhibition represents a range of human emotion. The photographs are from the museum’s permanent collection. The photographs were originally collected by David Davis, as a way to recall and reflect his memories of the era.

The photographs also reveal the activities of news gathering and publishing in the 1960s. Many are vintage wirephotos or file photographs from newspaper and magazine archives. These were used in editing, layout, and as camera art for the creation of printing plates. In the 1990s, when news outlets transformed their imaging libraries to digital formats, these objects were discarded or released onto the market. Many of the prints were stamped or inscribed on the back with a record of each use, and in this way they reveal their own history, and carry powerful qualities as artifacts.

“The Worcester Art Museum was among the very first American museums to exhibit photographs as works of fine art,” said Matthias Waschek, director. “In 1961, coincidentally the time that the Kennedy to Kent State era began, we established a curatorial department of photography and began building a permanent collection. These holdings now represent a survey of the history of photography in the United States in its fascinating variety. To the post-Baby Boomer generations, this exhibition has the power to awaken them to the correlation between their present lives and the not-so-distant past.”

Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation was organized by David Acton, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Worcester Art Museum. He has organized nearly 100 exhibitions at the museum, and published extensively on Old Master, American prints and drawings, and the history of photography. Notable among his exhibition catalogues are A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking 1890-1960, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, and Photography at the Worcester Art Museum: Keeping Shadows.

“Then, as now, pictures were the medium by which most people experienced the wider world,” said Acton. “Photographs created a common experience, plotting a historical arc of embracing familiarity. Kennedy to Kent State presents a selection of these pictures, providing a glimpse of that turbulent time. Many of the images transcend reportage. In their momentary imagery, refined compositions, and humanity, they attain the stature of true works of art.”

In 2000, David Davis founded the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design, home to the Driskel Gallery of Photography, and the Silas Kenyon Gallery of Regional Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Davis acquired the famous Vietnam photographs by Nick Ut and Eddie Adams, he began his 12-year project to collect a survey of the iconic images by which Americans experienced a transformative period of their history.

“I wished to do something that I have not seen before,” said Davis, “to present a kind of storyboard of the 1960s. From the time I entered my teen years until that of my college graduation, there were assassinations, an unpopular war, a trip to the moon and the rise of the protest movement and counterculture. It was a confusing, unsettling, exciting, and ‘far out’ time to grow up.”

BOB GOMEL: LIFE IN THE 1960'S

Black Muslim leader Malcolm X photographing Cassius Clay after he defeated Sonny Liston for the Heavy Weight Championship, Miami, February, 1964

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce an extensive exhibition of photographs from the 1960's by LIFE magazine photographer Bob Gomel. The exhibition opens with a reception for the photographer on Friday, October 5, from 5 to 7 PM. The exhibition will continue through November 18. (Listen here to Art Beat, radio interview about Monroe Gallery and Bob Gomel.)

 

The triumphs and tragedies of the 1960s provided photographer Bob Gomel and his LIFE magazine colleagues extraordinary opportunities to advance American photojournalism. "LIFE was the world's best forum for photojournalists. We were encouraged to push creative and technical boundaries. There was no better place to work in that extraordinary decade." The exhibition includes images of presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, the 1963 Freedom March in Washington, The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe and other entertainers; Malcolm X, and sports figures such as boxer Muhammad Ali, baseball legend Nolan Ryan, and golfer Arnold Palmer. Several unpublished images - including one of 90 heads of state gathered around the catafalque at the Kennedy funeral and another of John F. Kennedyemerging from America's first space capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston - are in the exhibition. (September 12, 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon ..." speech at Rice University, which Bob Gomel photographed for LIFE magazine.)

 Also featured is Gomel's perhaps most known photograph: of then 8 - year old John F. Kennedy Jr. standing solemnly at the funeral of hisuncle, Robert Kennedy, in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. This photograph appeared in a two-page spread in the June 1968 “Special Kennedy Issue” of LIFE magazine.

Bob Gomel was born (1933) and raised in New York City. After serving four years in the U.S. Navy, he was promptly offered a job at the Associated Press. But by then, he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do. “I just felt one picture wasn’t sufficient to

tell a story,” he explains. “I was interested in exploring something in depth. And, of course, the mecca was Life magazine.”He turned down the offer from AP, and began working for LIFE in 1959, producing many memorable images. When LIFE ceased being a weekly in the early 1970s, he began making photographs for other major magazines. Also in the 1970s, he branched out into advertising photography. Among other accounts, he helped introduce Merrill Lynch’s Bullish on America campaign.

Bob says, “Each time I raised a camera to my eye I wondered how to make a viewer say, “wow.” What followed were the use of double exposures to tell a more complete story; placing remote cameras where no human being could be; adapting equipment to reveal what could not ordinarily be captured on film. My goal with people was to penetrate the veneer, to reveal the true personality or character. The ideal was sometimes mitigated by circumstances, a lack of time or access. But more often than not what the mind conceived could be translated into successful photographic images. Life Magazine in the 60s sold 8,000,000 copies a week. It was a great honor to be a part of that information highway.”

 

 

Stan Stearns dies; captured immortal image at JFK’s funeral

John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin, November 25, 1963 with Ted Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, Peter Lawford, and

 Robert F. Kennedy in background  Stan Stearns/UPI

We are terribly sadddend by the passing of our friend Stan Stearns.

 It’s so iconic the rights to publish and use it have been resold twice for millions of dollars.“Stan wound up with $25."

The Washington Post

By Adam Bernstein
Published: March 2

“One exposure on a roll of 36 exposures,” Stan Stearns marveled decades later. The young news photographer, in one instinctive click, captured one of the most poignant and reproduced images of the past half-century: little John F. Kennedy Jr., grief-stricken, saluting his father’s coffin as it rolled by on a caisson.

Mr. Stearns died of cancer March 2 at the Mandrin care facility in Harwood, said his niece, Karla Bowles. He was 76 and had spent the past four decades running a photography studio in his native Annapolis.

His most enduring contribution to photography indisputably came on the chilly morning of Nov. 25, 1963, when he covered the funeral procession of the President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Stearns was working in Washington for the United Press International wire service when Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Outside Washington’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, where the president was celebrated and mourned a few days later, Mr. Stearns was jammed with 70 other photojournalists into a roped-off space meant for perhaps half as many.

As Kennedy’s caisson rolled by, Mr. Stearns trained his telephoto lens on first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who was veiled in black. When she bent down to whisper in her son’s ear, Mr. Stearns clicked as 3-year-old John Jr.’s right hand snapped into a salute. The boy was dressed in a blue dress coat and short pants. It was also his birthday.

“As the caisson was rolling out to Arlington Cemetery,” Mr. Stearns later recalled, “I asked every photographer I could if they had the salute. Duh! Nobody saw it. Everyone I talked to had been concentrating on Jackie and the caisson.”

He returned to the office, satisfied that he had the best picture of the day.

“The bureau chief almost had a hemorrhage,” Mr. Stearns told the Annapolis Capital in 2009. “I never saw a man turn as white as he did because I was not with the entourage going to Arlington. Then the big boss from New York overheard that and he said, ‘You better have it or you’re fired on the spot.’ ”

He had it.

The picture made the front pages of newspapers worldwide and was printed in mass-circulation magazines such as Life. The image came to define the emotion of the event in a way words may not have had the power to convey.

Just the mention of the salute can still revive memories for those who lived through that day. It remains one of perhaps a handful of pictures that evoke the span of the mid-20th century: Joe Rosenthal’s image of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, Eddie Adams’s photo of a South Vietnamese general’s street-side execution of a suspected Viet Cong, Nick Ut’s picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.

Mr. Stearns’s picture still resonates so completely because it speaks to the “trope of the brave little soldier that existed in American visual culture,” said Alison Nordstrom, a senior photography curator at the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester, N.Y.

Nordstrom said the Kennedys so fascinated the public because they were a young, photogenic family and so vibrant in the wake of the Eisenhower years. Familiar images of the Kennedy children — John Jr. hiding under his father’s desk, the president’s daughter Caroline with a pony — crystallized the way the public knew and identified with the family.

Mr. Stearns’s image of the salute brought it all together, Nordstrom said, “a combination of familiar tropes and familiar sentiments with figures who felt known to us.”

In 1999, John Kennedy Jr. was presumed dead after a small airplane he was piloting went missing. He was 38. Mr. Stearns’s picture was again summoned to remind readers and viewers of what the former first son had once represented.

“I felt a strong connection to him,” Mr. Stearns told the Baltimore Sun in 1999. “Covering the White House during the Kennedy years, I had a son just two years younger than John-John.”

Stanley Frank Stearns was born May 11, 1935, in Annapolis, where his parents owned a jewelry shop. His interest was jazz drumming until a relative gave him a Brownie Flash Six-20 camera for his bar mitzvah. He attended Annapolis High School and, at 16, began working as a photographer for the Capital newspaper.

He was an Air Force photographer from 1954 to 1958, taking pictures for military publications in Japan, and then joined UPI in a position he later described as “one step above floor sweeper.”

Mr. Stearns left the wire service in the early 1970s to start a photography studio in Annapolis. He continued working until his death. His niece described him as “cantankerous and very meticulous.”

His marriage to Maxine Skwersky ended in divorce. Survivors include a son, commercial photographer Jay Stearns of Annapolis; a brother; and four grandchildren.
News and government photographers periodically made claims to the famed image of the salute. All were discredited, but the compensation was entirely in glory, Mr. Stearns wryly noted.

“I got $25 for winning picture of the month” at UPI, he told the Sun. “That and my regular paycheck. It’s frustrating when I think of how much money that picture has made in the last 30 years. Probably $3 million to $5 million.”

UPI - Stan Stearns, 76, who took the photo of little John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin, died March 2.

The New York Times: Stan Stearns, Photographer of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s Salute to Father, Dies at 76

New Book: Jack Kennedy Elusive Hero Cover Photo by Mark Shaw

Photograph by Mark Shaw



Library Journal

Matthews (Kennedy and Nixon), host of MSNBC's Hardball and former aide to the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, has come to know many JFK insiders. Here he uses to excellent effect his conversations and interviews with those officials and friends as he seeks the real John F. Kennedy, that "elusive man," as JFK's own wife called him. Using the first person as he seeks out a full portrait of JFK, Matthews gives us an eminently readable biography, following Kennedy through his sickly and less-than-happy youth, his wartime heroism, and his presidency during the most perilous years of the Cold War. Although Matthews's coverage of Kennedy's pre-presidential career and the 1960 election is nearly as long as that devoted to the presidency, his most significant conclusion is that Kennedy's decision not to invade Cuba in 1962 likely saved the world from nuclear annihilation and at the very least stopped Soviet premier Khrushchev from invading West Berlin. VERDICT Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life and Richard Reeves's President Kennedy provide in-depth investigations of Kennedy's politics, but readers wanting a lively overview of Kennedy, the flawed man and inspiring leader, should turn to this poignant study

Iconic Monday: Is this the Best Wedding Photo Ever Taken?

Lisa Larsen: John and Jacqueline Kennedy at their wedding reception, Newport, RI, 1953


Via  I Like to Watch
Monday, February 28, 2011

The Blog of Writer and Editor David Schonauer

Last week I wrote about the engagement of Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Diana Spencer. To be more precise I wrote about a few pictures that captured that captivating event in 1981. For this Iconic Monday, we'll stay with love, or if not love with marriage. I have a nomination for the best wedding photo ever taken. It was taken on September 12, 1953, by Life magazine photographer Lisa Larsen, at the wedding of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island.


Undoubted I am drawn to this picture because of the Kennedy glamour. Kennedy weddings are about as close as we Americans come to royal weddings; their nuptials have combined romance and history in varying amounts. This photo seems loaded with both: Though JFK was still nearly seven years away from being elected President of the United States, I believe I can see here, in the sparkling presence of bride and groom, the first glimmerings of Camelot. (Or maybe it's just me; this is what happens when you look at photographs too much: They start speaking to you, and you can't be sure whether they're being entirely trustworthy.)

At any rate, Life.com has the contact sheet with this frame and Larsen's outtakes. So you can judge for yourself what kind of photographic gifts she brought to the wedding. Feel free to offer up other great wedding photos to compare.

I think I also admire the picture because of the photographer, who packed a little glamour of her own. Larsen was born in Germany and came to New York at age 17 after graduating from college. She was fluent in French, English, German, and had some Danish and Russian. She worked as a photographer for Vogue, Parade, Glamour, Holiday, and other magazines before being hired by Life as a contract photographer in 1950.

She did all kinds of assignments, surviving a trip into the Himalayas, trekking into Outer Mongolia (she was the photographer to do so after a government-enforced ten-year ban). The great photographer and Life historian John Loengard once characterized her to me as the "glamour girl" of photojournalism because she was so adept at endearing herself to people--particularly people who were newsworthy. According to Loengard, the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev once gave her a bouquet of peonies, and North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh said, "If I were a young man, I'd be in love with you." (Sort of makes you wonder if we might have found a better way to fight the Cold War, doesn't it?) She was fabulous looking, and warm, and she made the people she photographed look that way, too.

Larsen was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1957 and underwent surgery. She came back full of high spirit and ready to resume her career, but in fact she was not well. She died in March, 1959, 52 years ago, at age 34.

President Kennedy would die some four years later, a little more than ten years after Larsen took pictures at his wedding.

SHUTTLE DISCOVERY LAUNCHES INTO HISTORY; PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY'S SPACE SPEECH 49 YEARS AGO

 

AP/Chris OMeara

 
Discovery, the world's most traveled spaceship, thundered into orbit for the final time Thursday, heading toward the International Space Station on a journey that marks the beginning of the end of the shuttle era. Discovery is the oldest of NASA's three surviving space shuttles and the first to be decommissioned this year. Two missions remain, first by Atlantis and then Endeavour, to end the 30-year program.


It was Discovery's 39th launch and the 133rd shuttle mission overall. Discovery already has 143 million miles to its credit, beginning with its first flight in 1984. By the time this mission ends, the shuttle will have tacked on another 4.5 million miles. And it will have spent 363 days in space and circled Earth 5,800 times when it returns March 7. No other spacecraft has been launched so many times.


49 years ago, President John F. Kennedy laid out the ambitions for the United States Space Program.

Bob Gomel: John F. Kennedy, Houston, September 12, 1962

On a very hot late summer's day, September 12, 1962, President Kennedy visited the Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston. After a brief tour, he delivered brief remarks about the rapid achievements made by the country's space exploration program in recent years and its plans for future projects.

President Kennedy then travelled to Rice University in Houston, Texas, and gave this speech outdoors in the football stadium. The President spoke in philosophical terms about the need to solve the mysteries of space, reaffirmed America's commitment to landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s and also defended the enormous expense of the space program.

"We choose to go to the moon. 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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.


It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency."

Text of speech here.

5OTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INAGURATION OF JOHN. F. KENNEDY

Alfred Eisenstaedt: President John F.Kennedy with his wife, Jacqueline, and Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson at inaugural celebration, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC, January 20, 1961



50 years ago, John F. Kennedy began his inaguration speech at 12:51 Friday, 20 January 1961, immediately after taking the presidential oath of office. It included the memorable line:

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country"

More: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum