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 47^th to 50^th 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 21^st 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.

The Lensic, 211 W San Francisco St.,

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:

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

   The Hartford Courant: JFK Assassination: The Zapruder Film, Life Magazine And A Gentleman's Deal

    LIFE photographer Bob Gomel Got Closer Than He Wanted to JFK Funeral

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

 ©Bob Gomel: Horse Drawn Caisson Bearing John F. Kennedy's Casket, 1963

William Wilson, of the Navajo Nation, is making his own kind of history, by using wet plate collodion process to produce portraits of Native Americans

Second-year UNM law student Michelle Cook has her photo taken by artist William Wilson. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)


Via The Albuquerque Journal


William Wilson, of the Navajo Nation, is making his own kind of history, by using an old-style process to produce portraits of Native Americans.

Wilson held a public portrait studio this month on the University of New Mexico campus, using a large-format camera and the historic wet plate collodion process.
“The particular beauty of this old photographic process references a bygone era and the historic images that continue to contribute to society’s collective understanding of Native American people,” according to a news release.

William Wilson develops a tintype as part of his collection of Native American portraits. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

Wilson’s work will be on display at the Maxwell Museum at UNM through Jan. 31

These are some of the images created by photographer William Wilson. His work will be on display through Jan. 31 at the Maxwell Museum on the UNM campus. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

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

Richard Stolley poses with a copy of The Day Kennedy Died: 50 Years Later LIFE Remembers the Man and the Moment in his Santa Fe home Nov. 6. Stolley was the reporter who obtained the Zapruder film for Life magazine. Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican

 

"Stolley was the first reporter to make contact with Zapruder, late on the night of Kennedy’s assassination. Then, facing fierce competition from other members of the press, he outwitted them all to buy the rights to the film for Life magazine, which published 22 frames from it in an issue that appeared on newsstands just three days after the president’s death.

 

The Santa Fe New Mexican has an extensive article detailing how Richard Stoley secured the rights the the recording of John F. Kennedy's assassination.

 

 Photo exhibit

• Exhibit opening of Life Photographers featuring a special selection of photographs of John F. Kennedy

 •Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave.

• 5-7 p.m. Nov. 29 Includes book signing with Richard Stolley

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

 ©Time Inc.

Related:

  Former 'LIFE' magazine photographer Bob Gomel is sharing his memories of the president and the day he was laid to rest

  Former senior editor of LIFE magazine, Hal Wingo remembers the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963 vividly

  The Hartford Courant: JFK Assassination: The Zapruder Film, Life Magazine And A Gentleman's Deal

 

   LIFE photographer Bob Gomel Got Closer Than He Wanted to JFK Funeral

  'Life' photographer calls JFK his most charismatic subject
 

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

 

 

 

 

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.

Prepare For Beatlemania

Via The New York Times


The 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first visit to the United States is shaping up to be nearly as noisy as the original event, but without crowds of screaming fans congregating at Kennedy Airport and the Plaza Hotel and, of course, without the Beatles themselves. CBS announced on Thursday that it would show a two-hour special, “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles,” on Feb. 9 at 8 p.m. – the same date and time slot (and on the same network) as “The Ed Sullivan Show,” on which the Beatles made their live American television debut. The show will include covers of Beatles songs by current stars (none of which have been announced) in performances to be taped Jan. 27.


Two days later, on Feb. 11 – the anniversary of the Beatles’ first American concert, at the Washington Coliseum – a tribute band, Beatlemania Now, will re-enact that concert at the Coliseum (also called the Uline Arena) as a benefit for the DC Preservation League.



Related: Bill Eppridge's photographs of the Beatles.

STEPHEN WILKES - DAY TO NIGHT

 

 

Photograph by Hance Partners/Image Craft ©All Rights Reserved

Stephen Wilkes' acclaimed Day To Night series is featured on today's TIME LightBox, see it here.

The TIME magazine print edition features an 8 page photo essay, and the issue will be on stands tomorrow, Friday dated November 25, 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related: Stephen Wilkes Day To Night featured on CBS Sunday Morning

 

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.

Jeremy Scahill with Tom Engelhardt

Via The Lannan Foundation

Jeremy Scahill’s new book and film Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, is an investigation into the U.S. government’s covert wars which he suggests are drawing the nation deeper into conflict across the globe, setting the world stage for destabilization and blowback. The October 30, 2012 talk was followed by a conversation with Tom Engelhardt.

This event was part of the Lannan In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series.

Click here for audio and video.

Audio player only.

Remembering Camelot

"The pictures that shape how we remember John and Jacqueline Kennedy"

 

 

With photographs by Mark Shaw, Ed Clark, Cecil Stoughton, Lisa Larsen, Jacques Lowe,

Stanley Tretick, Hank Walker, Charles Moore, and many others.

 

Related: "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.)

 

 

 

 

Springfield Museums All Access: Our time with Bill Eppridge

Bill Eppridge (1938-2013)

Photo by R. David Marks, Courtesy Monroe Gallery

Via MassLive.com
By Holly Smith Bovè The Republican    
November 04, 2013 at 6:00 AM, updated November 04, 2013 at 8:14 AM



The staff and curators here at the Springfield Museums were saddened to learn that Time Life photographer Bill Eppridge had passed away on October 3. Bill had recently paid us two visits, both in conjunction with our recent exhibit, The Beatles: Backstage and Behind the Scenes. Bill’s work comprised the majority of that exhibit, and we were honored to have him join us just prior to the opening.

On a cloudy day in March, I met Bill and his wife, Adrienne Aurichio, at the D’Amour Museum for a quick meeting before he was due to tape an interview on WGBY’s Connecting Point. Our brief “hello” turned into an impromptu guided tour of the photos by Bill himself. As a Beatles fan, it was truly amazing to hear his recollections of meeting the Fab Four after their arrival at JFK airport, and how they charmed the press corps with their energy and enthusiasm– a far cry from the “drug fiends” that Bill and his colleagues were told to expect. Seeing a potential bigger story to tell, Bill quickly asked his editors at LIFE if he could stay on and photograph the group. Luckily, they agreed, and Bill’s photographs from those first weeks in the U.S. captured a critical moment in our national and cultural history.

Bill charmed all of us in that first meeting, stopping to chat with staff and even taking a picture with some lucky photography students from Sci-Tech who happened to be attending the exhibit. He, in turn, was transfixed by the Indian Motocycles and Rolls-Royces at the Wood Museum; he had always dreamed of owning a vintage Indian.

Bill guides Holly through his Beatles photos at the D'Amour Museum.  

Springfield Museums 

Bill returned to the Museums in April for a special talk in conjunction with the exhibit, during which he recalled his time with the Beatles and his many other major assignments. He seemingly covered every major news stories of the time – from the Civil Rights Movement to Vietnam, and from Woodstock to Apollo 13. His photos from even one of those assignments would have been the peak of any photographer’s career, but they were all eclipsed by Bill’s haunting photo of Robert F. Kennedy, mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet, his head cradled by a busboy. Bill spoke with obvious emotion about his time covering RFK’s campaign for president in 1968, and how the candidate inspired a truly diverse group of supporters. On that fateful day in Los Angeles, Bill was only steps behind Kennedy when the shots rang out. Bill was clearly proud of that picture, was haunted by it, and recognized its place in this country’s history.

In an industry where we meet many interesting and inspiring people, Bill truly stood out as one of the most memorable. Wherever he went, he was gracious and accommodating, and he always had his camera at the ready, fully prepared for that next great shot. We at the Museums mourn Bill’s passing, and we feel blessed to have had the chance to not only display his work and meet one of the true legends in his field but also to introduce him to our amazing city and community.

A selection of Bill Eppridge's photographs will be featured in the exhibition "The LIFE Photographers", Monroe Gallery, November 29 - January 24, 2014.

Related: Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure