Showing posts with label World War II photographers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World War II photographers. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

"Not even a world war stopped this artist"


Georgia O’Keeffe, Santa Fe, LOOK, 1960

Via The Santa Fe Reporter
June 28, 2017,
By Maria Egolf-Romero, Alex De Vore


This Friday, a diverse collection of images in the exhibit Tony Vaccaro: From War To Beauty at the Monroe Gallery of Photography gives Santa Feans a glimpse into the life of the 94-year-old photographer from scenes of World War II to commercial fashion shots, and beyond.

This artist’s lens has captured some of the most famous humans ever—think Sophia Loren, Pablo Picasso and Marilyn Monroe. But some of his first forays into photography were spent documenting World War II. Drafted at 21 years old, Vaccaro carried a 35-mm camera through the trenches of Europe and used innovative techniques to develop his film: Patiently waiting for nightfall, the artist-soldier used the tools available to him in the middle of a war. “I would go over the ruins of a village and try to locate where a camera shop might have been,” he says. “So, in the ruins I could find developer and the things which you need.” Chemicals in hand, Vaccaro used helmets as developing trays; developer, water, hypo and more water to rinse; four helmets in succession in the pitch black. “From Normandy to Berlin, that’s how I developed my pictures,” he tells SFR.

Vaccaro had a long and illustrious career in photography after the war as well, including time working for magazines like Life, Harper’s Bazaar and Newsweek. His work took him to amazing places like the Nile River in Egypt and to photograph fabled architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

But which photo stands out to Vaccaro as his crowning achievement? Georgia O’Keeffe, he says. He asked the painter to take her work outdoors. “It’s one of the great photographs of my life, yes—I have it right in front of me—she’s in profile, and all you have is black, her face and then the great color of that painting,” he says. “The greatest [memory] was Georgia O’Keeffe, and coming to Santa Fe, and it was just Georgia and Tony for about a week or more. It was superb, really.” (Maria Egolf-Romero)

Opening Reception 5 pm Friday, June 30
Free 
Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave.
992-0800

Screening 3:45 pm Saturday July 1.
Free.
Center for Contemporary Arts Cinematheque, 1050 Old Pecos Trail 
(Seating is limited, RSVP Required)  982-1338




Wednesday, November 9, 2016

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

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.


Friday, September 16, 2016

Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to represent Tony Vaccaro




Kiss of Liberation: Sergeant Gene Costanzo kneels to kiss a little girl during spontaneous celebrations in the main square of the town of St. Briac, France, August 14, 1944
 
VACCARO STUDIO - MONROE GALLERY
New Partnership And Fall Schedule


Santa Fe, NM -- Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to announce an exclusive partnership with the Tony Vaccaro Studio for digital and analog print sales of Tony's iconic images. 

Monroe Gallery of Photography was founded by Sidney S. Monroe and Michelle A. Monroe. Building on more than five decades of collective experience, the gallery specializes in classic black & white photography with an emphasis on humanist and photojournalist imagery– a perfect fit for the 450,000 images in the Vaccaro archive. Monroe Gallery will be exhibiting Vaccaro’s work in the exhibition “History in a Moment”, September 30 to November 20. In a statement, the Monroe’s commented: “It is a privilege to present Tony’s historic career in photography, and we are pleased that his work will be featured in this important exhibit alongside so many other great 20th and 21st century photojournalists.”  

Monroe Gallery will also contribute to the success of a special pop-up gallery under the direction of veteran curator, and art critic Peter Frank. “Tony Vaccaro: War, Peace, Beauty”, November 11 to 21, 2016, at 508 West 26th Street, 5th floor, in the West Chelsea Building, in New York City’s Chelsea district. Just shy of 3,000 square feet, the exhibit will be open from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. with an opening reception, Friday, November 11, 6 – 8 pm. Sidney and Michelle Monroe will be in attendance. Sundays the space opens at noon. A special exhibit of Vaccaro''s photographs will be on view at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe through December 31, 2016.

“Tony Vaccaro now boasts a seven decade career capturing images iconic to the 20th century. He aimed his camera at the Second World War and its’ aftermath with the same urgency and grace that made him one of the most artful postwar fashion and celebrity photographers. His portraits of artists, statesmen and women, invariably present their subjects deeply and vibrantly embedded in their milieus.” – Peter Frank.

Soon to turn 94, Mr. Vaccaro still carries a camera and puts in six or seven hours without a break; creating prints in his darkroom and identifying jobs for the staff. Mr. Vaccaro recently finished a run of ten prints of Eleanor Roosevelt from 1946. Mr. Vaccaro will make appearances in Boston (Sept. 22), at the Margaret Mead film festival in NYC (October 15), at the ICP in NYC (Nov.10), and at his pop up show. A solo exhibit of Mr. Vaccaro’s work will be presented at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, in 2017.

Gallery hours are 10 to 5 Daily. Admission is free. For further information, please call: 505.992.0800; E-mail: info@monroegallery.com.


About Tony Vaccaro

This Fall, the documentary film “Under Fire: The Untold Story of Private First Class Tony Vaccaro” will premiere at film festivals across the United States, and air nationally on HBO on November 14. The film tells the story of how Tony survived the war, fighting the enemy while also documenting his experience at great risk, developing his photos in combat helmets at night and hanging the negatives from tree branches. The film also encompasses a wide range of contemporary issues regarding combat photography such as the ethical challenges of witnessing and recording conflict, the ways in which combat photography helps to define how wars are perceived by the public, and the sheer difficulty of staying alive while taking photos in a war zone.

At the age of 21, Tony was drafted into the war and by June of 1944, he was on a boat heading toward Omaha Beach, six days after the first landings at Normandy. Tony was determined to photograph the war, and had his portable 35mm Argus C-3 with him from the start. For the next 272 days, Tony fought on the front lines of the war.

After the war, Tony remained in Germany to photograph the rebuilding of the country for Stars And Stripes magazine. Returning to the US in 1950, Tony started his career as a commercial photographer, eventually working for virtually every major publication: Look, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, Newsweek, and many more. Tony went on to become one the most sought after photographers of his day, photographing everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren to Pablo Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Tony turns 94 this December, and his photographs are available for the first time exclusively at Monroe Gallery of Photography.


The Wall Street Journal:
Exposing a Life, From WWII to the West Village A documentary and a new exhibit put photographer Tony Vaccaro into focus