Life Photographers: What They Saw
Editorial Reviews The New York Times Book Review, Andy Grundberg John Loengard, himself a Life veteran, has done us all a service by interviewing 43 of Life's best-known photojournalists (and including a CBS interview with himself) about the how, who, what, where and when of their most famous pictures. New York Times, Grace Glueck, November 13, 1998 What didn't they see, those powerful photojournalists who worked for Life magazine in its heyday: wars, summit conferences, urban squalor, country comforts, lives of the rich and the poor, political events, minority struggles, the famous and the infamous, on and on and on. This show celebrates the publication of a book containing interviews with 44 Life photographers by John Loengard, Life's former picture editor.
Many of the photographers in it are world-renowned like Andreas Feininger, Carl Mydans, Cornell Capa, Gordon Parks, Dmitri Kessel, Alfred Eisenstaedt, all of them made memorable pictures in the days before television cut in on Life's turf.
Some of the great images are here, and may not be unfamiliar in Life readers who go back far enough, like Hansel Meith's unforgettable close-up of a lone male rhesue monkey half submerged in a body of water, scowling balefully at the intrusive lens. Less well know, but equally startling is David Scherman's 1945 shot of Lee Miller half submerged in Hitler's bathtub in Munich, looking winsome as she prepares to scrub her back.
General Douglas MacArthur lands on Luzon in the Philippines that same year, sloshing through water under the watchful lens of Mr. Mydans; in 1954 a group of Little Leaguers in Manchester, N.H., recorded by Yale Joel, drop their illfitting pants in a demand for new ones. Bill Kay was on hand at the 1952 Democratic fund raiser in Madison Square Garden where Marilyn Munroe sang "Happy Birthday" to President John Kennedy, and Harry Benson caught a pillow flight among the Beatles at the George V Hotel in Paris 1964.
This is photography of an in the moment; it has no esthetic aspirations. Still the show reaffirms that photojournalism is an art all its own. Life Photographers: What They Saw
Life Photographers: What They Saw,John Loengard,Bulfinch Press,0821225189,Biography,Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions,Interviews,Journalism,News photographers,Photo Essays,Photography,Photojournalism,United States
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