Tuesday To-Do in NYC: Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro Discussion at ICP

Via ICP

World War II, Tony Vaccaro played two risky roles, serving as a combat infantryman on the front lines, as well as a photographer who shot nearly 8,000 photographs. Though he began as a young GI eager to record the war, he vowed never to take another war photo on the day the conflict ended, horrified by what he had seen.

Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro chronicles the life and vision of this remarkable man, exploring how photography defines the way the public perceives armed conflict, and revealing the sheer difficulty of survival while taking photos in a war zone.

Clips from the film will be shown, followed by a panel discussion. (The entire film will not be shown.)

Panelists

• Tony Vaccaro
• Max Lewkowicz
• James Estrin

Bios

With a $47 camera and developing the negatives in his helmet at night, World War II infantryman Tony Vaccaro took nearly 8,000 photographs on the frontline, creating one of the most comprehensive, haunting, and intimate photographic records of combat of all time. In the decades that followed the war, Tony would go on to become a renowned commercial photographer for magazines such as Look, Life, and Flair, capturing everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren to Pablo Picasso and John F. Kennedy. Tony's work is currently on display at a retrospective in Caen, France and housed in a permanent museum in his honor in Bonefro, Italy. His work is represented by Tony Vaccaro Studio in New York and he is the subject of HBO Documentary Underfire: The Untold story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, premiering November 14, 2016.

Max Lewkowicz, founder and owner of Dog Green Productions and director of Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, has written, directed, and produced feature films and hundreds of productions for network and public television, museums, and multinational organizations. He is the recipient of a New York Emmy for his feature film Morganthau, as well as the Silver Screen Award at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival, the grand prize of The Chicago International Film Festival, and the 2003 Award of Excellence from the National Association of Museum Exhibitions.

James Estrin is a Senior Staff Photographer for the New York Times. He is also a founder of Lens, the Times's photography blog, and co-edits it with David Gonzalez. Mr. Estrin has worked for the Times since 1987 and was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team in 2001. He is a co-executive producer of the movie Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, which will appear on HBO in November 2016. He teaches at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Visual Arts Digital Photography Program as well as at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Mr. Estrin attended the Advanced Studies Program at the International Center of Photography from 1979 to 1980.

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Full details here.


View Tony Vaccaro's photographs at Monroe Gallery of Photography

Tony Vaccaro: War, Peace, Beauty - A Pop Up Retrospective

© Tony Vaccaro: The Violinist, Venice, Italy, 1947

TONY VACCARO: WAR PEACE BEAUTY
A pop-up photographic exhibit, in association with the Monroe Gallery of Photography
November 11 – 21, 2016
10:00 am to 6:00 pm, Mondays through Saturdays; 12 - 6 on Sundays
508 W 26th Street, Loft 5G, New York, NY 10001
Also on view at Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM

www.monroegallery.com

Essay by Peter Frank from the Catalog TONY VACCARO: WAR, PEACE, BEAUTY

When our lives and our communications were based on a simpler equation than they are now – when there were no social media posts suspended in a zone of truthiness and selfies took a week to come back from the camera store – our relation to the big news and big names of the day was a distant one. Pictures from wars were ominous and dramatic; pictures of celebrities were glamorous and iconic; fashion shots were staged in places we never knew could exist. These people and places and events impacted our lives indirectly – closely enough to get us to vote and go to the movies, but at enough of a remove as to float somewhere between the real and the imagined, the now, the soon, and the later. Time elapsed between the taking and the delivering of the photograph, which gave the photographer just enough room to make a good picture out of a good image – and a good story out of that. This is an entirely different approach to reportorial photography than we’re used to these days; it allowed photographs of urgency and beauty to be artful as well as truthful. Major periodicals were built on this approach, and for decades brought both the world and the brilliance of the people who photographed it to a huge and hungry audience.

Tony Vaccaro is one of these brilliant photographers, one of the last. He may have lived long enough to see his values all but swallowed up by the vacuity of today’s globalized and instantaneous sociobabble; but Vaccaro has also lived long enough to see his own work, along with his peers’ from the golden age of photojournalism, enshrined as examples of the-news-as-art. Vaccaro was adept at conveying what a portrait subject meant to her or his civilization with the same immediacy invested in what a tank rolling through a town meant. Both images had a monumental right-thereness, the moment at once fleeting and eternal. And such images retain that vitality and profundity to this day.

Vaccaro’s early life was spent between the United States, where he was born in Pennsylvania in 1922, and Italy, where his parents’ families resided. In 1939, with the formation of the Axis, Tony and his sisters reclaimed their American passports and returned Stateside. Encouraged by a high school art teacher in suburban New York, Vaccaro discovered himself as a photographer at age 20 – just in time to enter the army and be sent over to England with the 83rd Infantry Division. The “Thunderbolt Division” landed on Omaha Beach two weeks after D-Day and fought its way into Germany, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. As a frontline scout, Vaccaro had both time and inclination to compile photographic documentation of combat, army life, and the newly liberated Europeans he encountered. Discharged from the army in September 1945, Vaccaro stayed in Germany until 1949, working as a photographer for (among other news services) Weekend, the Sunday supplement of Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. His documentation of postwar life throughout Europe was as reverberant as his combat-zone work had been, and – recording as it does both momentous political occasions and everyday life in a continent reduced to rubble – as much of a contribution to history.

Returning to the United States, Vaccaro embarked upon a career as a feature and fashion photographer. This was at a time when glossy weekly publications, with their emphasis on the visual, comprised a form of communication distinct from, complementary to, and every bit as  successful as daily newspapers. Vaccaro spent more than two decades contributing to such magazines as Life, Look, Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Newsweek, Venture, Quick, and Flair, working out of Rome as well as New York and proving equally adept at portraiture, fashion, and action photography. Indeed, many of his published photographs in various genres have proven signal images of the postwar era, etched into the public’s memory as deeply as those of Arnold Newman, Margaret Bourke-White, or Vaccaro’s friend W. Eugene Smith. People know Gwen Verdon, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, and Ali MacGraw through his lens as much as they do through the lens of filmmakers; his photo series on Georgia O’Keeffe culminated in an unforgettable picture of the painter holding an abstract painting before the landscape that inspired it. Vaccaro’s vast inventory includes many more such photographs, published and unpublished. In his day he was one of the more sensitive photographers of artists, whether capturing a pensive Jackson Pollock in his studio, a stolid Giorgio de Chirico in raking light, or Frank Lloyd Wright gesturing like a conductor while lecturing at Taliesin. Vaccaro’s postwar portrayals of Europeans, especially Italians, capture in still photography the gritty but poignant neo-realist spirit of filmmakers like Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti. His often experimental fashion shoots play on the animated patterns and extravagant contours coming out of European fashion houses in the 1950s and ‘60s. No matter who they are, Vaccaro seems to empathize with the thoughts and spirits of his subjects, endowing his pictures with a doubled allure for the viewer: you wish you’d been there even as you feel you somehow had been. This allure is only heightened by Vaccaro’s exquisite compositional sense, a formal elegance that calls attention to the subject rather than to itself even as it pervades everything. As Vaccaro has said, “I was born with this idea in my head that every photograph has an order. I have always believed in this. Without geometry, I don’t do photography. Each photograph must be in the geometry.”

As the glossy weeklies (the fashion magazines excepted) waned in prominence in the 1970s, Vaccaro worked less and less with them until officially retiring in 1982. Of course, he has not put his camera down for an instant since, adding steadily to an oeuvre that now numbers some half-a-million pictures. About to celebrate his 94th birthday, Vaccaro is still very much among us. Despite many honors in Europe and America, however, despite numerous exhibitions and upwards of a dozen publications, Vaccaro’s remains a name just beyond the public tongue. We know so many of his images, we respond so readily to his intimate connection with his subjects and his innate ability to compose a picture, but we can’t quite place the signature. The experts know him, historians cite him, his peers laud him as their equal, and those who would keep such inventive photojournalism alive in our Instagram culture turn to him for inspiration. But only now, with a new television documentary and new exhibitions and publications, are the rest of us coming to recognize Tony Vaccaro, not just as one of many cameras in the crowd but as an artist, artisan, reporter and story-teller with his own style and spirit – and, again, author of some of the quintessential images of the postwar era.

— Peter Frank

For further information please contact Monroe Gallery of Photography.