PHOTOGRAPHY WEBLOG

Carl Mydans, who photographed 20th Century events from the Great Depression to wars and politics and was a charter member of the Life magazine staff that pioneered magazine photojournalism in the 1930s, has died. He was 97. Mydans died at home Monday night of heart failure.

In a career spanning half a century, Mydans traveled the world with his cameras, witnessing and recording landmarks of history _ the gaunt faces of 1930s dust-bowl farmers, Gen. Douglas MacArthur wading ashore on his return to the Philippines in 1944, French women having their heads shaved as punishment for "collaboration" with the Nazis, and the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri a year later.

Mydans first attracted attention in the mid-1930s for his work as a photographer for the federal Farm Security Administration. His stark black-and-white portraits of Arkansas farm families dramatized the plight of rural people victimized by the Depression.

When Life magazine came into existence in 1936 as a bold new experiment in pictorial journalism, Mydans was the fifth photographer hired, joining icons Alfred Eisenstadt, Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy and Peter Stackpole on the magazine staff that would set new standards for news and feature photography.

Bron: AP.

Meer over Carl Mydans bij The Digital Journalist en The New York Times.


Generaal MacArthur zet voet aan land. Eén van de beroemdste foto's van Carl Mydans.