Showing posts with label Zapruder film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zapruder film. Show all posts

Thursday, November 28, 2013

The LIFE Photograpers Opening Reception Friday, Nov. 29, 5 - 7 PM



 Alfred Eisenstaedt ©Time Inc., President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., 1961. Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography


Via Photograph Magazine Newsletter

Looking Back at Camelot: On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the country is remembering and paying its respects. At the Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, The LIFE Photographers opens November 29, an exhibition concurrent with the publication of LIFE: The Day Kennedy Died: 50 Years Later LIFE Remembers the Man and the Moment. LIFE photographers had unusual access to the Kennedy family, and their photographs no doubt helped create the mystique surrounding the family. LIFE editor Richard Stolley will be at a reception and book-signing at the opening Friday, November 29, 5 - 7 pm.

Wednesday, November 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

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

BILL EPPRIDGE EXHIBIT FEATURES THE HISTORIC MASTER VINTAGE PRINT OF ROBERT KENNEDY SHOT

©Bill Eppridge

"Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure" features the historic master vintage print of Busboy Juan Romero trying to comfort Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy after assassination attempt, June 5, 1968. Taken by photographer Bill Eppridge, it is the original master print used to reproduce this iconic image in the LIFE magazine issue dated June 14, 1968. Eppridge's photograph of Robert F. Kennedy running on the beach in Oregon was on the cover.




On the night of Senator Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles, LIFE was closing that week's issue. Bill Eppridge’s negatives were processed in Los Angeles by J.R. Eyerman, and then flown to the Time Life lab in New York for printing. The printer was Carmine Ercolano, and he made only one master print for reproduction purposes. The negative was very thin, and the face of the busboy had to be airbrushed to bring out his features. The airbrushing is visible on the print, as are the pencil instructions along the bottom in the white border. This master print was later copied on a 4 x 5 camera, in the Time Life lab, and all future reproductions were made using a copy negative.

The master print was given to Bill Eppridge by Doris O'Neill, then the Director of the Time Life Picture Collection, shortly after LIFE magazine ceased weekly publication in 1972. Bill Eppridge was reluctant to display the print in his home in Laurel Canyon, and he placed it behind a sofa. Sometime later, a canyon fire destroyed his home. When Bill returned to the house to retrieve belongings, he found the print had burned around the edges, but had survived the fire.

Writing in Black & White magazine in September, 2008, photography appraiser Lorraine Anne Davis stated:

"An artifact is a human-made object that gives information about the culture of its creator and its users, and reflects their social behaviors. An icon, from the Greek "image", is a representation that is used, particularly in modern culture, as a symbol representing something of greater significance.

"Several 20th-century photographs have attained icon status but few are considered artifacts. One example is Bill Eppridge's damaged photograph of Bobby Kennedy as he lay wounded in a kitchen passageway in Los Angeles.

"But how does one value such an object? What comparables are appropriate? Would it be possible to compare it with the film footage shot by Abraham Zupruder that captured President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963? That film was deposited with the National Archives in 1978 by the family for safekeepimg. In 1992 a Federal law required all records of the assassination be transferred to the National Archives, passing ownership to the government. It acknowledged that the Zapruder family was entitled to reimbursement as owners of private property taken by the government for public use, but establishing the value was difficult. the case eventually went to arbitration, and a three-member panel awarded $16 million to the family, the highest amount ever paid for a historical artifact. One of the panel members disagreed - he thought that $3 - $5 million would have been more realistic, as the family had always controlled the licensing of images from the film. The issue lay with the value of the original film strip as a collectible object. Since there have been no documented sales of any other historically significant original film strips, the dissenting member of the panel felt the value was in the image and not in the film strip itself.

Like the film, the burned photograph belongs in a national museum - however, valuing it will be difficult because the event and the object are so emotionally charged that it will be difficult for any appraiser to remain dispassionate."


"Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure" continues through September 26, 2010.

Watch Bill Eppridge discuss events leading to the night of the assassination in this trailer from the forthcoming documentary "The Eye of The Storm".

Updated: Bill Eppridge Tributes and Obituaries

Related: A Civil Rights Legacy: Neshoba and The Price of Freedom.