Showing posts with label John F. Kennedy assassination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John F. Kennedy assassination. Show all posts

Saturday, June 19, 2021

Richard B. Stolley, a journalist who left an indelible imprint on two of the most influential American magazines of the 20th century and secured J.F.K. film, dies at 92

The Washington Post:

 Richard B. Stolley, a journalist who left an indelible imprint on two of the most influential American magazines of the 20th century, obtaining a copy of the Zapruder film footage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination for Life in 1963 and later building a newsstand juggernaut as the founding editor of People, died June 16 at a hospital in Evanston, Ill. He was 92



Dick Stolley with photographer Tony Vaccaro n Santa Fe in 2017
Richard Stolley (left), former Time magazine bureau chief, and Assistant Managing Editor and Managing Editor of Life magazine, led a Q & A with photographer Tony Vaccaro (right) following the screening of the film "Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro" in 2017 in Santa Fe.


Dick Stolley with photographer Bill Eppridge at the 2011 Lucie Awards

Dick Stolley (right) is pictured here with photojournalist Bill Eppridge (left) at the 2011 Lucie Awards, where Eppridge received the Award for Achievement in Photojournalism. One of Eppridge's most memorable and poignant essays was his coverage of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, including the iconic photograph of the wounded Senator on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen seconds after he was shot
Life photographer Bob Gomel, Hal Wingo, journalist and editor at LIFE and PEOPLE WEEKLY magazines, and Michelle and Sid Monroe at the Monroe Gallery of Photography.



Richard Stolley, the Man Who Launched PEOPLE Magazine, Dies at 92


Santa Fean recalls day he secured rights to video of JFK assassination  


Saturday, November 22, 2014

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


 Bob Gomel poses with one of the cameras he used while covering pop culture for Life magazine in the 60s Slide show here.


Via Houston Chronicle

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last year as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy loomed, The Texican visited with noted photographer and Houston native Bob Gomel at his home in the Memorial area to talk about his career behind the lens. Gomel captured some of the most poignant images of the funeral of the slain president that the world would ever see. It was an especially sad assignment for Gomel, who once spent an afternoon with Kennedy watching football while he was on the campaign trail. With the 51st anniversary on Saturday, here’s a look back at that profile of Gomel, 81, who still keeps busy globetrotting with his trusty collection of cameras.

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.

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.”

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.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

A Day in the LIFE

Wingo calls the period surrounding Kennedy’s assassination a national “state of shock.” - Enrique Limón


Fifty years after JFK’s assassination, Hal Wingo looks back
By Enrique Limón
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

• 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
 
 
 
 
 

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
|


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.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Save the date: November 29 - Book signing with Richard B. Stolley "The Day Kennedy Died"


Kennedy’s Assassination: How LIFE Brought the Zapruder Film to Light

Via Life.com





50 years after JFK’s assassination, LIFE.com presents the story of how an editor named Richard Stolley flew straight to Dallas from Los Angeles within hours of the assassination; how he tracked down Zapruder; how he purchased the film for LIFE magazine — and what all of that ultimately came to mean for LIFE, for Zapruder, for Stolley himself and for the nation, then and now.

Having flown from L.A. that afternoon, Stolley was in his hotel in Dallas just hours after the president was shot, “when I got a phone call from a LIFE freelancer in Dallas named Patsy Swank,” Stolley remembers, “and the news she had was absolutely electrifying.  She said that a businessman had taken an eight-millimeter camera out to Dealey Plaza and photographed the assassination. I said, ‘What’s his name?’ She said, ‘[The reporter who told her the news] didn’t spell it out, but I’ll tell you how he pronounced it.  It was Zapruder.’

“I picked up the Dallas phone book and literally ran my finger down the Z’s, and it jumped out at me — the name spelled exactly the way Patsy had pronounced it. Zapruder, comma, Abraham


Richard Stolley will be signing copies of the new book "LIFE: The Day Kenedy Died" during the opening reception for "The LIFE Photographers" exhibition on November 29,  5 - 7 PM, at Monroe Gallery of Photography. The exhibition continues through January 24, 2014.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Sunday: Dick Stolley tells the story of the Zapruder film

As Jacqueline Kennedy crawls away from her fatally wounded husband, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill jumps onto the back of President Kennedy's limousine, in a frame from Abraham Zapruder's amateur movie of the assassination.
As Jacqueline Kennedy crawls away from her fatally wounded husband, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill jumps onto the back of President Kennedy's limousine, in a frame from Abraham Zapruder's amateur movie of the assassination. (The Sixth Foor Museum: Zapruder (1967); WFAA TV Collection)

(Via CBS News) - "It was the single most dramatic moment of my 70 years of journalism," Dick Stolley, former editor of LIFE magazine, says of his first time watching the film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Sunday on "Face the Nation," we'll talk to Stolley, who helped the magazine purchase the 26 second film, as well as the granddaughter of the man who captured the most famous home movie in American history.

As offers poured in to purchase the film, Alexandra Zapruder says her grandfather feared his footage would be used distastefully. When Zapruder did hand over film to Stolley and his colleagues at LIFE, the contract mandated that the film be used "consonant with good taste and dignity."

We hope you'll join us Sunday for this special interview. Local listings here.



On the 6:25 from Grand Central to Stamford, CT, November 22, 1963
On the 6:25 from Grand Central to Stamford, CT, November 22, 1963
Carl Mydans  ©Time Inc.


Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce "The LIFE Photographers”, an exhibition concurrent with the publication of the new book "LIFE: The Day Kennedy Died, 50 Years Later LIFE Remembers the Man & the Moment". The exhibition opens with a public reception and book signing by renowned LIFE editor Richard Stolley on November 29, and will continue through January 24, 2014. The famous Zapruder film first appeared in LIFE, after being acquired by Richard B. Stolley. At the time, Stolley also interviewed Dallas police, Kennedy administration officials, members of the Oswald family, and workers at Jack Ruby's bar.

LIFE magazine photographers had unparalleled access to John and Jacqueline Kennedy, from even before they were married. Fifty years ago on November 22, 1963, in Dallas's Dealey Plaza, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline. LIFE magazine, the weekly pictorial chronicle of events in America and throughout the world, was quickly on the scene. The exhibition 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".

LIFE published an astonishing number of the most memorable photographs ever made, and the exhibition also includes many of these photographs from defining moments of the 20th century. The preeminent LIFE photographers set the standard for presenting us with poignant images that seem to lift right off the page and vividly reflect our society’s mindset at the time.

The exhibition of more than 50 photographs also includes iconic images from World War II, and, of course, Alfred Eisenstaedt's sailor kissing the nurse on VJ Day; powerful photographs from the American South during the Civil Rights movement; memorable images of Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles and many more indelible photographs.



Related: EXCERPTS FROM AN EVENING OF PHOTOJOURNALISM

Friday, May 24, 2013

1963




Fire hoses aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963
 Charles Moore, Fire Hoses Aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, 1963,
Gewlatin silver print, 11” x 14”


THE Magazine
June, 2013

The very time I thought I was lost/
My dungeon shook and my chains fell off
—African-American spiritual


 

In the preface to his 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, a poetic exploration of race and religion in the United States, James Baldwin made an important, if paradoxical proclamation: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” More than half a century after thethirty-one-year-old African-American writer released his book to a shifting American public, civil rights issues are still a vast and clumsy national topic.

Monroe Gallery’s current show of black and-white photographs is titled, simply enough, 1963, and covers that tumultuous year in American history with empathy and remarkable beauty. While human-rights concerns were gaining visibility in many parts of the country, changes must have felt imperceptible in many others, and the exhibition does a great job of visually encapsulating this disparity. Entering the space, one first sees photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr.—fitting enough, considering he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. An image of this iconic moment shows King at a podium, surrounded by listeners. Nearby,the picture Fire Hoses Aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, 1963, depicts three people being blasted with water from an unseen fireman during a protest in Alabama. The image is jarringly visceral and utterly captivating. In President John F. Kennedy Visiting Berlin, 1963, we see a gaggle of admirers clamoring around the figure of the president in a black car. JFK’sassassination would take place just five months later, a knowledge that, for the viewer, imbues the scene with an incredible poignancy. In a nearby photo, a barefoot Jackie Kennedy walks along the Palm Beach shoreline with her little son.

Undoubtedly, for most of us the show is a powerful history lesson. James Meredith, the first African-American to graduate from the infamously segregated University of Mississippi, is pictured surrounded by U.S. Marshals but his face retains a calm poise. A sobering handful of images memorialize the funeral of Medgar Evers, a pioneering and vocal advocate for African-American rights, who was shot and killed by a Ku Klux Klansman who wasn’t initially convicted of the crime. For the most part, the other half of the gallery space displays work that’s less politically and emotionally charged. A particularly lovely composition shows Steve McQueen and his wife relaxing in a hot tub, cigarettes and wine goblets in hand. The next photograph shows the be-sunglassed actor sitting on a sofa, holding a pistol. Next to this is a four-paneled composition of Sean Connery, posing with a sly grin and a gun. An image of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and a handful of photos of athletes like Arnold Palmer and Sandy Koufax round out this part of the show. These shots are no doubt meant to inject a little levity, but I thought the placement of images that either depict violence or else strongly suggest it, coupled with Hollywoodstyle showiness and triumphant moments in sports history, made for an incompatible and somewhat unpalatable juxtaposition.

In 1963, ten years after he spoke of his conflicted relationship with America, James Baldwin penned a letter to his teenage nephew, elaborating on what he called “my dispute with my country.” In it, he warns the boy that though people know better than to behave out of fear and hate, they often “find it very difficult to act on what they know.… To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.” Fifty years after this letter was written, it can still be said that the politicians who ostensibly represent us are afraid to be committed to a strong position when it comes to making decisions on issues like gun control and same-sex marriage. There’s a potentially squirmy reaction from photography lovers who walk into Monroe Gallery and expect foggy landscapes and nudes, and that’s one of the reasons 1963 is such an admirably courageous little exhibition. More than a show, this grouping of photographs is really a meditation on an era that isn’t completely in America’s rearview mirror. In 2013, being an American and loving America can feel downright paradoxical, and though we can’t always make amends for the wrongs committed by our nation in her past, the work in this show seems to quietly remind us that through learning and remembering, we can pave the way for a kinder future.

—Iris McLister
 
 

Friday, April 19, 2013

1963: "Pictures Paint A Thousand Words"

 
 
 
On the 6:25 from Grand Central to Stamford, CT, November 22, 1963
Carl Mydans ©Time Inc. 
On the 6:25 from Grand Central to Stamford, CT, November 22, 1963
 
Friday, Apr 19, 2013
 
 

It is hard to believe it has been 50 years since 1963. That tumultuous year seems engraved in our memories. The Monroe Gallery of Photography on Don Gaspar is opening “Photographs from 1963,”a major exhibition of shots from one of the most pivotal years in U. S. history. The exhibition opens with a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m. today.

Gallery co-owner Michelle Monroe said 1963 was a year of change: “change in leadership and social change.”

“1963 ran the gamut of human emotion and human endeavor,” Monroe said in an exhibition statement. “It was a year that began with high hopes for easing of international tensions, a year that sustained a terrible period of shock and mourning and ended with a nation and a world community coming to understand a new maturity in its ability to cope with sudden and enormously difficult circumstances.”


Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham, 1963
Ernst Haas
Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham, 1963


“As the year began, George C. Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama, and during his inauguration address he stated, ‘Segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!’,” Monroe recalled. “The year would continue: the U.S. performs the first nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site; the Beatles release ‘Please Please Me;’ the Birmingham police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful demonstrators; and then there are church bomb attacks in Birmingham and, later, riots. President John F. Kennedy signs a law for equal pay for equal work for men and women as Gov. Wallace tries to prevent blacks registering at University of Alabama. Gov Wallace later prevents the integration of Tuskegee High School as James Meredith is awarded a bachelor’s degree by the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), becoming the first black man to graduate from the school, and John F. Kennedy says segregation is morally wrong and that it is ‘time to act.’ Just hours after President Kennedy’s speech, civil rights activist Medgar Evers pulls into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers and is struck in the back with a bullet and killed.


Fire hoses aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963
Charles Moore
Fire hoses aimed at Demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963
 

“In 1963, President Kennedy visits West Berlin and delivers the ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (I am a Berliner) speech; the major league baseball All Star MVP is Willie Mays of the San Francisco Giants; the Los Angeles Dodgers sweep the New York Yankees in the 60th World Series; ‘Cleopatra’ premieres in New York City, and 1963 draws to a close with President Kennedy assassinated. And on Dec. 26 the Beatles release ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’/'I Saw Her Standing There.’


Elizabeth Taylor, "Cleopatra", 1963
©mptv
 

“These and other events marked the year as a benchmark of unrest, tumult, and change, and all are represented in ‘Photographs from 1963,’” Monroe added. “We have seen many of these photographs numerous times in newspapers, magazines, books and documentaries. Universally relevant, they reflect the past, the present, and the changing times. These unforgettable images are imbedded in our collective consciousness; they are defining moments chronicling our shared history. The photographers in this exhibition have captured dramatic moments in a remarkable year, and illustrate the power of photography to inform, persuade, enlighten and enrich the viewer’s life.”

Photographs in this show are the work of a select group of photojournalists, many of whom worked for TIME and LIFE magazines. They include Charles Moore, Ernest Withers, Bill Eppridge, Steve Schapiro, Bob Gomel, Francis Miller, Stan Stearns and Eddie Adams.


If you go WHAT: “Photographs from 1963″
WHEN: Today through June 30; reception 5-7 p.m. today
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar
CONTACT: (505) 992-0800

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Exhibition of new and definitive collection of Mark Shaw’s photographs of The Kennedys



Jackie Kennedy at John. F. Kennedy's Senate desk, 1959

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce a major exhibition of photographs by Mark Shaw, concurrent with the publication of the new book "The Kennedys". The exhibition opens with a public reception on Friday, November 23, from 5 - 7 PM. The exhibition of vintage and contemporary editions will continue through January 27, 2013.

 Published by Reel Art Press, this stunning new publication is the definitive collection of Mark Shaw’s renowned photographs of the Kennedys. Most of the photographs featured in the book and exhibition have never been seen before. Shaw first photographed the Kennedys in 1959 for Life magazine. He subsequently developed a close friendship with the family that gave him extraordinary and informal access to their inner circle. During the following four years, Shaw captured them at their most relaxed: in Nantucket, Hyannis Port, Jacqueline's family home in Merrywood, Virginia and on The Amalfi Coast with the Agnellis. On the campaign trail in West Virginia, pre-White House at their first proper family home in Georgetown and at the star-studded inauguration gala. He became the Kennedys’ unofficial family photographer and his captivating shots capture some of their most intimate and candid moments. Among the most memorable photographs must be the image that was JFK's personal favorite; the photograph he told his family and friends he liked best. Perhaps somewhat poignantly, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches, it is the image of Kennedy walking alone in the sand dunes at Hyannis Port which resonates, alongside a later iconic and moving image of the rider-less horse and the fallen leader’s reversed riding boots.

Mark Shaw lived from 1922-1969. As a photographer he is perhaps best known for his images of Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, however he was also a leading fashion photographer, Mark Shaw worked for Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and a host of other fashion magazines. He started working for LIFE magazine in 1952 and in 16 years shot 27 covers and almost 100 stories. Throughout the 1950's and 1960s' Mark Shaw shot the European fashion collections for LIFE, and was one of the first photographers to shoot fashion on the runways and "backstage" at the couture shows. Decades after his death, Mark Shaw’s photographs continue to be published regularly in books and magazines.
Among the many notable people Mark Shaw photographed were Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Melina Mercouri, Danny Kaye, Nico, Cary Grant, Pope Paul VI, Yves St. Laurent and Chanel.
 In his later years Mark Shaw also began filming commercials for television. He was the winner of many awards from the American TV commercial Festival for his work in commercials and from the Art Director's club for his earlier still work. Mark Shaw's Vanity Fair Lingerie and Chase Manhattan Bank's "Nest Egg" campaign are print advertising classics. Mark Shaw worked as a top print advertising photographer until his untimely death in 1969 at the age of 47. After his death, most of his work was hastily put into storage. All but a small number of photographs remained unseen for almost 30 years. In 1999, his only child, David Shaw, and David's wife, Juliet Cuming, moved the collection to Vermont, where they took on took on the job of creating the Mark Shaw Photographic Archive. In storage for almost 40 years, Mark Shaw's work is finally being unearthed, archived and made available for this exhibition.
 
Copies of the new book Mark Shaw: The Kennedys are available from the gallery  $75
Monroe Gallery of Photography was founded by Sidney S. Monroe and Michelle A. Monroe. Building on more than four decades of collective experience, the gallery specializes in classic black & white photography with an emphasis on humanist and photojournalist imagery. The gallery also represents a select group of contemporary and emerging photographers. Monroe Gallery was the recipient of the 2010 Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Excellence in Photojournalism.
Gallery hours are 10 to 6 Monday through Saturday, 11 to 5 Sunday. Admission is free. For further information, please call: 505.992.0800; or email.info@monroegallery.com

Saturday, March 3, 2012

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.
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.