Milton Rogovin

Milton Rogovin, an optometrist and persecuted leftist who took up photography as a way to champion the underprivileged and went on to become one of America’s most dedicated social documentarians, died on Tuesday at his home in Buffalo. He was 101. He died of natural causes, his son, Mark Rogovin, said. 

Mr. Rogovin chronicled the lives of the urban poor and working classes in Buffalo, Appalachia and elsewhere for more than 50 years. His direct photographic style in stark black and white evokes the socially minded work that Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks produced for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Today his entire archive resides in the Library of Congress.

Captured Life Under Communism

Mr. Lockwood in Cuba with Fidel Castro, whom he persuaded to sit for a long and highly personal interview in 1965.

Lee Lockwood, an American photojournalist who had rare opportunities to capture political, military and civilian life in Communist countries — documenting the treatment of an American prisoner of war in North Vietnam and persuading Fidel Castro to sit for a long, discursive, smoke-filled and highly personal interview — died on July 31 in Tamarac, Fla. He was 78 and lived in Weston, Fla. The cause was complications of diabetes, his sister, Susan Lewinnek, said.

As his work through the decades made clear, Mr. Lockwood regarded photojournalism as a potent instrument for social change. A freelance photographer, he was associated for many years with the Black Star agency, which furnished his images to newspapers and magazines around the globe. He also wrote several books, including “Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel: An American Journalist’s Inside Look at Today’s Cuba in Text and Picture” (Macmillan, 1967).

Lee Lockwood/Black Star - Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton of the Navy, a prisoner of war in Hanoi in 1967. “His eyes were empty,” Lee Lockwood wrote.

In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, Mr. Lockwood was the first outside photographer in more than a decade to be allowed into North Vietnam. (Not long before, while in Havana to research his Castro book, he had prudently obtained a North Vietnamese visa there.)

The fruit of Mr. Lockwood’s 28-day visit, a long, heavily illustrated essay titled “North Vietnam Under Siege,” was published as the cover article of the April 7, 1967, edition of Life magazine.

Though Mr. Lockwood’s trip to North Vietnam was carefully controlled — he was forbidden to photograph military installations and had a government official with him at all times — he managed to traverse 1,000 miles in the month he spent there.

In words and photos, Mr. Lockwood portrayed the life of a country then under heavy bombardment by United States forces: bare, ruined villages; deserted factories; a boy with a missing leg, lost to a bomb. There were also calmer, quieter images of farmers, flower sellers and hemp dyers plying their trades.

His most striking encounter, in Hanoi, was with Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton, an American Navy pilot who had been captured in January 1967. As Mr. Lockwood and other foreign newsmen listened, a man identifying himself as Commander Stratton read over a loudspeaker a long “confession” attacking United States involvement in the region. Then, from behind a curtain, Commander Stratton appeared, looking, Mr. Lockwood wrote, “like a puppet.”

“His eyes were empty,” Mr. Lockwood wrote. “He stood stiffly at attention while movie lights were turned on and photographers took pictures. His expression never changed.” Accompanying Mr. Lockwood’s account was his photograph of Commander Stratton, clad in prison pajamas, making a deep, supplicating bow on orders from a North Vietnamese officer. The image, which occupied a full page of the Life article, was widely reproduced. Partly in response to Mr. Lockwood’s article, the State Department accused North Vietnam of brainwashing American prisoners to elicit antiwar statements from them. In an interview with The New York Times in 2008, Commander Stratton, who had been released in 1973, suggested that such statements were less the product of brainwashing than of common sense. “You are being tortured and all you have to do to get them to stop is say the same thing that Bobby Kennedy is saying,” Commander Stratton said.

Lee Jonathan Lockwood was born in New York City on May 4, 1932, and took up photography as a boy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Boston University in 1954 and later did graduate work in the field at Columbia. In the mid-1950s, he served with the Army, stationed in Munich.

Besides his sister, Ms. Lewinnek, Mr. Lockwood is survived by his wife, the former Joyce Greenfield, whom he married in 1964; a brother, Roger; two children, Andrew Lockwood and Gillian Rubin; and six grandchildren.

His other books include “Conversation With Eldridge Cleaver: Algiers” (McGraw-Hill, 1970) and “Daniel Berrigan: Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes — Conversations After Prison With Lee Lockwood” (Random House, 1972).

Mr. Lockwood’s best-known book was the one born of his marathon interview with Mr. Castro, which unspooled over a full week in Cuba in 1965. The discourse ranged over Marxism, the Cuban missile crisis, American race relations, sex, prostitution and much else.

It was vital, Mr. Lockwood believed, that American readers be given a full portrait of a man known here as a cipher at best, a demon at worst.

“We don’t like Castro, so we close our eyes and hold our ears,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “Yet if he is really our enemy, as dangerous to us as we are told he is, then we ought to know as much about him as possible.”

August 7, 2010

Lee Lockwood Dies at 78; Captured Life Under Communism

By MARGALIT FOX

iconic Times Square kissing photo

Edith Shain dies at 91; WWII nurse in iconic Times Square kissing photo

She was a married, part-time nurse when she joined the jubilant crowd celebrating V-J Day and was kissed by a young sailor. The photo by Life magazine's Alfred Eisenstaedt was seen by millions.

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times. June 24, 2010

It's one of the most iconic images to emerge from World War II.

Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of an anonymous young sailor in a dark-blue uniform dipping a white-uniformed nurse backward while giving her a long kiss in the middle of Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945, symbolized the euphoria surrounding the news that the Japanese had surrendered and the war was finally over.

Edith Shain, a retired Los Angeles elementary school teacher who claimed to be the mystery nurse in the photo seen by millions around the world, died of cancer Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, said her son, Michael. She was 91.

Shain was a married, 27-year-old part-time nurse at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan when she joined the jubilant crowd in Times Square celebrating V-J Day.

"You can imagine how people felt. They were just elated," Shain said in a  2005 interview with The Times. "Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country. I closed my eyes when I kissed him. I never saw him."

When Eisenstaedt's photo ran in Life magazine the following week — he had neglected to get the names of his subjects, whose faces are obscured in the picture — Shain recognized herself but was too embarrassed to tell anyone it was her.

"But I knew it was me," she said. "I was wearing the same kind of shoes, and I had the same kind of seams in my stockings. And a little bit of my slip was showing."

Immediately after the sailor kissed her, Shain said, she encountered a soldier who also wanted a kiss. But that was enough for her, and she and the friend she was with left Times Square.

Shain later moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a nurse before becoming a longtime kindergarten and first-grade teacher at Hancock Park Elementary School. She was married and divorced three times and had three sons.

In 1980, no longer embarrassed by her Times Square encounter with the anonymous sailor and wanting a copy of the famous photo, Shain wrote to Life magazine and identified herself as the nurse.

Eisenstaedt himself flew out to meet her.

"He looked at my legs and said I was the one," Shain recalled.

Eisenstaedt gave Shain a copy of the photo and, according to The Times article, Life flew her to New York for a luncheon.

In one of his books that he later inscribed for her, Eisenstaedt wrote that she was "the one and only nurse" whom he had photographed in Times Square.

But Bobbi Baker Burrows, a Life editor familiar with the subject, told the Associated Press in 2008 that Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, was never sure that Shain was the nurse in the photo.

Burrows recalled that when interest in the photo was renewed, Life ran an article saying, "If you are the sailor or the nurse in the picture, please step forward."

"We received claims from a few nurses and dozens of sailors, but we could never prove that any of them were the actual people, and Eisenstaedt himself just said he didn't know," she said.

Carl Muscarello, a former New York City police detective, was one of the men who have claimed to be the sailor in the photo.

"Everything points to him," Shain told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1995. "He was tall enough that he could execute that form."

During the 60th anniversary of V-J Day in 2005, Shain and Muscarello appeared together in Times Square, where they exchanged a kiss for photographers and a large crowd.

Shain, however, was still not convinced that Muscarello was the sailor who had bussed her.

"I can't say he isn't," she said. "I just can't say he is. There is no way to tell."

Born July 29, 1918, in Tarrytown, N.Y., Shain graduated from a nursing school in New York and earned a bachelor's degree in education at New York University. She retired from teaching in 1985.

"The famed kissing nurse," as the New York Daily News once called her, often served as honorary grand marshal of Veterans Day and Memorial Day parades and spoke to World War II veterans' groups.

She was scheduled to appear in Times Square in August for a V-J Day celebration.

She also had been serving as national spokesperson for a grassroots initiative to establish a permanent national day of remembrance on the second Sunday of every August to honor the men and women of the World War II generation.

"She used to call herself an accidental celebrity, and she felt she should use that celebrity for the common men and women of the World War II generation," said Warren Hegg, national supervisor of the Keep the Spirit of '45 Alive initiative.

In addition to her son Michael, Shain is survived by her sons Justin and Robert; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Civil Rights Photographer's Documentary

In some stories, you have more material than you know what to do with. That was the case yesterday as I worked on an obituary for legendary photographer Charles Moore, who shot the civil rights movement from 1958 to 1965 in his native South.

Luckily, a filmmaker made a 30-minute documentary, "I Fight With My Camera," in which Moore tells some of his great stories and many of his photos are shown. This film was shown on PBS, I'm told, but I missed it. It's incredibly moving and worth your time.

Included in the obituary itsef are some  amazing photos, including this iconic image:

Charles Moore photographed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1958 arrest in Montgomery, Ala. King's wife, Coretta, is second from right. (© Charles Moore/black Star)

Charles Moore, 79, dies; photographed civil rights violence
By Patricia Sullivan
Tuesday, March 16, 2010


Charles Moore, 79, whose searing Life magazine photographs of the civil rights struggle helped change American public opinion about the movement, died March 11 at a nursing home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He had kidney disease and other illnesses.

His photos of patrol officers roughing up the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., snarling police dogs attacking protesters, white civilians and police beating black demonstrators and the fierce spray of fire hoses pinning a trio of teenagers against a brick-walled building shocked the nation's conscience when the images began appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"The photographs of Bull Connor's police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood and make legislation not just necessary . . . but possible," historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said. Jacob Javits, the former Republican senator from New York, said Mr. Moore's photos "helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."


Traveling throughout the South, often with writer Michael S. Durham, Mr. Moore documented the violence and hope of the civil rights movement from 1958 until 1965. A piece of hurled concrete injured him in Birmingham, Ala., but he kept shooting. He was thrown in jail with a dozen angry white men who had been locked up for vagrancy and drunkenness. Enraged whites forced their way into his motel room at the University of Mississippi, where he had gone to cover the enrollment of James Meredith, the school's first black student, and began pounding on the former Golden Gloves boxer.

"I've never seen such hate in anyone's face before," he later said, according to John Kaplan, a professor at the University of Florida, who wrote his master's degree project on Mr. Moore. "It was like I were vermin."


At the time, half of the adults in the United States read Life magazine and its photography was world-renowned. Mr. Moore shot multiple cover photos and photo spreads that brought the civil rights struggle into starkly personal focus. His graphic coverage of the 1963 riots in Birmingham was spread over 11 pages, and its impact was immediate, provoking reactions from President John F. Kennedy, black activist Malcolm X and others. Artist Andy Warhol created "Mustard Race Riots," a silkscreen version of Mr. Moore's photograph of police dogs.

"In Birmingham when I saw the dogs I don't think anything appalled me more, and I've been to Vietnam," Mr. Moore told the New York Times in 1999. "I photographed it, and the world rushed in. I realized the power of even one image. . . . What changed was my awareness. I wanted to show how awful, how vulgar, how terrible this whole thing was."


Charles Lee Moore was born in Hackleburg, Ala., and grew up in Tuscumbia, Ala., the son of a Baptist minister who did not believe in racial epithets. Mr. Moore served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a photographer and attended the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif. He returned to his native state in 1957 to work at a portrait studio, and soon made his way to the local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser.

He quickly met King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "I photographed him at the pulpit with a cross behind his head. I got down low to get the power of this man," Mr. Moore told Kaplan. "From then on, I wanted to cover him. I wanted every assignment I could get." "I did not know at the time my pictures might make a difference. But I knew this man would make a difference," Mr. Moore said in the 1995 documentary "Charles Moore: I Fight with My Camera."


Mr. Moore was the only photographer on hand in 1958 when King was arrested after trying to attend a court hearing for his aide Ralph Abernathy. He jumped behind a police booking station counter to shoot a photo of King being manhandled by the police. The photograph went out on the Associated Press wires, and Life magazine included it in its next issue, launching his career.

He told The Washington Post about another incident in Montgomery a few years later. "I saw the guy pull that bat out of a bag. I shot while I was still running. I got three or four quick shots off. He's swinging that bat at that woman, right at her head. If you look closely, someone else has a thick chain and maybe a Coke or beer bottle.


"It makes me sick every time I see it," he said. "It was a pretty powerful statement about what lengths white people in the South could go to stop integration."


In 1962, he tried to leave Alabama for New York, but returned to the South when the founder of the Black Star photo agency gave him a small retainer to cover the civil rights movement.


Trading on his Southern heritage, Moore was the only Life magazine photographer able to persuade Mississippi's defiant governor, Ross Barnett, to pose for a picture. As Meredith tried to enroll at the university, Moore talked his way inside the administration building, where 200 unarmed federal marshals were holed up. After a night of violence, in which a French reporter and a local man were killed, he had the only photos of the mayhem inside: 28 marshals had been shot and 160 others injured.


He moved on to cover the Ku Klux Klan and the Selma to Montgomery marches, including a violent clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that became known as "Bloody Sunday." Mr. Moore became so well-known for finding the story that Durham, his Life magazine journalist partner, said, "At one point . . . a well known TV reporter said that when trouble starts happening on the civil rights story, find out where Charles Moore is." Durham wrote "Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore" (1991).

In 1965, sick of the violence he had experienced, Mr. Moore left the country for most of a year. When he returned, he resumed freelancing, focusing on conflicts in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Vietnam. He was a freelancer for numerous magazines, doing travel stories and corporate portraiture.


In 1968, when King was assassinated, Mr. Moore was in Palo Alto, Calif., on a magazine assignment. "We had on the radio and heard the flash," he told Kaplan. "I just pulled the car over to the side, listened to the news and cried. After all I'd done, I felt bad I couldn't be there on that day in Memphis in 1968. I knew him and he knew me."


After he won the first Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism in 1989, there was new interest in his civil rights photos. In addition to his book of civil rights photos, he also published "The Mother Lode," a book on Gold Rush country in California's Sierra Mountains.


His six marriages ended in divorce.


Survivors include four children from his second marriage, Michael Moore and April Marshall, both of Dothan, Ala., Gary Moore, of Lewisville, Tex., and Michelle Moore Peel of West Palm Beach, Fla.; a brother; seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Friend and photographer of James Dean,

 

Dennis Stock, a photographer whose iconic images of James Dean helped seal the actor's legacy after his death in 1955, died Monday in Saratoga, Fla., the Magnum photo agency announced today. He was 81. Stock shot Dean during the filming of "Rebel Without a Cause" and in the actor's hometown of Fairmount, Ind. But his best known photo was of Dean walking in the rain in Times Square.

Stock also documented the hippie lifestyle in the 1960s as well as jazz figures in New Orleans and elsewhere.

A selection of his photos can be seen at the Magnum website here.

-- Claire Noland

Photo: James Dean in New York City, 1955. Credit: Dennis Stock / Magnum

Photographer Inspired by Mexico

Marcey Jacobson in 2006.






August 11, 2009
, a Photographer Inspired by Mexico, Dies at 97
By Bruce Weber (NY Times)

Marcey Jacobson, a self-taught photographer from New York City who spent decades in the southern Mexican highlands documenting the lives of the indigenous Indian peoples, died on July 26 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, in the state of Chiapas. She was 97.

The cause was heart failure, said a friend, Janet Schwartz.

Ms. Jacobson was eking out a living in New York City doing mechanical drafting when she first visited San Cristóbal in 1956, intending only a short stay. Instead she found a place she called “the solution to everything,” and, with her companion, Janet Marren, a painter, settled there for the rest of her life.

Chiapas is one of the Mexican states I have not visited, and wish to visit.

She took up photography with a borrowed Rolleiflex camera. Patiently exploring the colorful city, the central marketplace for the Mayan-speaking Indian villages of the region, she won the trust of the often camera-shy locals and taught herself the craft of making black-and-white pictures from what she saw in its cobblestone streets and muddy byways, in its dramatic landscapes and weather events, and perhaps most of all, in the faces of the inhabitants. Her portraits were haunting.

“She had to read how-to-do books on developing and ask Americans to bring paper and chemicals when they came this way to visit,” Ms. Schwartz wrote in an e-mail message on Wednesday.

The results, about 14,000 negatives produced mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, describe the local daily life, its mercantile, religious and familial rites, in sensitive detail. They are destined for the Na Bolom Museum in San Cristóbal, Ms. Schwartz said.

Most of Ms. Jacobson’s work preceded the Zapatista revolution of 1994, when San Cristóbal was one of the cities briefly seized by leftist forces demanding better treatment for Mexico’s indigenous people. But what the photos frequently reveal are the tensions inherent in an ingrained caste system and the changes in a city and a society undergoing modernization.

In 2001, when she was 90, her work was at last widely recognized; 75 of her photos were collected in a book, “The Burden of Time”/“El Cargo del Tiempo,” printed in a bilingual edition by Stanford University Press.

Marcella Jacobson was born in the Bronx on Sept. 27, 1911. She was by temperament a bohemian, and by political leaning a socialist. She traveled frequently, first visiting Mexico in 1941. In New York working for political causes, she found herself particularly moved by the plight of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, protesting on their behalf outside the White House and visiting the funeral home after their execution. Ms. Schwartz said her friend’s willing escape to Chiapas was no doubt affected by the pressures she felt, as a lesbian and a Communist sympathizer, during the McCarthy era in the United States.

No doubt. A communist lesbian in 1952? What a target she would have made for a zealot.

Ms. Jacobson leaves no immediate survivors. Her partner, Ms. Marren, died in 1998.

“I love being locked up all alone in a darkroom, where nobody can get at me,” Ms. Jacobson said in a 1990 interview published in 2006 in Bridges, a Jewish feminist journal. “You take a negative, you put it in the enlarger, you expose a piece of lined paper, you put it in the developer. It’s absolutely blank. But then it develops, and you watch it, the image floats up to you. And then — you re-experience what you experienced when you took the photograph.”

Always Comfortable in Her Own Skin

The art critic John Berger once wrote: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.” I’m pretty certain he never met Bettie Page, naked, nude or otherwise.

In the 1950s Ms. Page, who died on Thursday, was Queen of the Pinups, appearing in thousands of photographs and numerous short films in states of jubilant undress. Whether entirely bare or decked out in garters, stockings and heels, a ball gag tucked in her mouth, she always appeared to be having a swell time. With her encouraging smile, she didn’t just look as if she enjoyed being photographed; she looked as if she enjoyed your looking at her too. That smile and the ease of her poses — the way she seemed comfortable even when trussed up in rope so intricately knotted that it would have made an Eagle Scout gasp or take up new habits — were invitations to a party that I suspect most of her admirers were too fainthearted to attend.

Paula Klaw/Movie Star News

Bettie Page in one of a number of movies she made for the photographer Irving Klaw around the 1950s. More Photos »

She was for a long period a great mystery and a cult obsession. I first encountered her in the 1980s in an East Village store that sold movie and music zines with a few curiosities tossed in. Many of the zines were blurrily mimeographed, held together with staples and bile, which may be why I gravitated to the colorful glossy covers of a new little magazine, about the size of Reader’s Digest, called The Betty Pages. (The correct spelling of her name didn’t emerge until later.) Published and edited by a comic-book illustrator named Greg Theakston, the magazine was my introduction to all things Bettie and something of a time machine, harking back to a long ago when men’s magazines were called Titter and Flirt.

Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, Dies at 85 (December 12, 2008)

The Betty Pages was filled with essays, interviews, reproductions of pinup photographs, and movie and still advertisements that detailed the nature of the work for which its star attraction became famous. One typical advertisement trumpeted:

“Our latest High Heel movie featuring beautiful model Betty Page WAS MADE SPECIALLY TO PLEASE YOU. We know you will want to see more of this popular model. Betty wears black bra, panties and black stockings. Several close-ups of her walking in high heels.”

Yowza! The advertisement was for a short titled “Teaser Girl in High Heels,” distributed by a New Yorker named Irving Klaw, who, with his sister, Paula, sold movie star photographs and very special specialty items through their downtown store and mail-order service. In the late 1940s the Klaws began shooting and selling their own bondage and fetish material, catering to the tastes of a loyal clientele: “Corset and Stocking,” “Girls in Extreme High Heels,” “Battling Girls.” There was no nudity, just a lot of rope and kink. In 1952 Ms. Page started working for the Klaws and quickly became their most popular model. “She could do looks of real horror or happy shots with ease,” Ms. Klaw said of the seminude cutie. “She was a natural.”

It was, more than anything, that sense of naturalness that made Ms. Page a star in this shadowy 1950s world and later a favorite of the likes of Dave Stevens, who featured a Page character in his comic “The Rocketeer” (the basis for a drab 1991 movie with a luscious Jennifer Connelly). Born in Tennessee in 1923, Ms. Page moved to New York in the late 1940s after going nowhere in Hollywood. She posed for a variety of publications, as well as for camera clubs, where groups of men took their own private snaps. Some of the loveliest images of her were actually taken by a woman, the photographer Bunny Yeager, who shot her in a leopard-skin swimsuit and nothing at all, and sometimes in the company of two cheetahs.

Ms. Yeager’s photographs are more in the style of classic cheesecake than the images Ms. Page produced with the Klaws, which were made hastily, often at the rate of hundreds of photos a day. Ms. Yeager took a shot of Ms. Page wearing a wink and a Santa hat (that landed in Playboy), along with some embarrassing images of the model with a black man in face paint with a (ahem) spear. But she also took a series of vibrant beachfront shots of Ms. Page, including a candid image of her on a boat in nothing but a small smile, her profile to the camera. She’s entirely naked and so seemingly at ease in her own bare skin that the shot seems less like a professional opportunity and more like a private message.

To look at these photographs is to enter another world. I don’t think for a minute it was a more innocent world, but it was one in which sexualized images of women, even trussed up in rope, seemed somehow, well, charming. I’m sure there are plenty of women and some men who would disagree, saying that one generation’s erotica is another’s pornographic exploitation. But the sheer volume of images that wash over us now have blunted our sensibilities, I think, and made us less alive to the beauty, the poetry and the mysteries of the naked body. We are surrounded by visuals that are far more explicit than any Bettie Page pinup, images of oiled and sculptured flesh that promise the universe and deliver so little.

December 13, 2008
An Appraisal
Always Comfortable in Her Own Skin
By MANOHLA DARGIS