Shooting Past 80

From the summit of Iwo Jima to Hitler's Germany to the Hollywood soundstage, pioneers of a new profession created the indelible images of the 20th century. For a portfolio of 18 of photography's most enduring masters, now clicking into their 80s and 90s, DAVID FRIEND gets the likes of Joe Rosenthal, Yousuf Karsh, and Cornell Capa to recall the days when their art was young and the stories—the Depression, World War II, the space program—were big. With new portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Phil Stern, 81

Phil Stern—Hollywood photographer, kibitzer, and raconteur—on the early days: "I was wounded twice in World War II as a combat photographer. Covered the [Stateside] return of my own battalion with John Hersey for Life. Crossed paths with William Saroyan. We were bunkmates." On Sinatra: "He didn't appreciate studio-cafeteria lunches. So he'd have buckets of pasta from Villa Capri brought to his dressing room. He had a plane that he had decked out with a piano, like a miniature nightclub." On added value: "I had no idea about fine-art photographic prints [until] I got a call around 1982. 'You know, you're in an auction-house catalogue.' And so I am, sandwiched between Steichen and Stieglitz, [a] subliminal bamboozle. They found an old James Dean print of mine in the files of a defunct magazine and sold it for $ 1,200. James Dean's my old-age annuity. In one of my pictures, Dean's got that insouciant, 'fuck you' look on his face. The National Westminster Bank thought he represented rebellious youth. So they put it in a full-page ad!" On current events: "News flash. I just got a call and they want me to shoot stills for a movie starring Raquel Welch. I start tomorrow. I haven't done heavy lifting on a set in 15 years. It's being shot digitally. My life span covers silent films, talkies, celluloid, and now digital. I've been fished out of the grave!"

Photographed—with his 1953 image of Marilyn Monroe—in Los Angeles on August 2, 2000.

Arnold Newman, 82

Other photographers had done it, but rarely with such power or so consistently. That is: to define individuals, especially fellow visual artists, by exploiting their workaday surroundings. Builder Robert Moses, sturdy and defiant on a precarious girder. Nazi-era arms baron Alfried Krupp, demonically ensconced in his factory lair. Composer Igor Stravinsky, off-center and dwarfed by a piano's lid shaped like some outsize flat from a page of music (opposite). For inspired visions such as these, Arnold Newman has been heralded as the father of the environmental portrait. For 51 years his own milieu has had one exquisite fixture: his wife, Gus, with whom he was photographed the week last summer when his new, eponymous book returned to press for a second printing. Newman appreciates such milestones But by constitution he's more inclined toward melancholy. When expressing condolences to a friend about the recent folding of Life, which often published Newman's work, he is careful to add the Hebrew blessing a/av ha-sholom (May it rest in peace). Then his voice quavers. "I just lost my best friend," Newman says of sculptor George Segal. "Then (painter] Jake Lawrence. Both made the front page the same day. It was dreadful." How does he cope with such loss? Love, he confides. And work. "Tomorrow, I'm going over to photograph George's studio as he left it. A record ought to be made."

Photographed in New York City on July 18, 2000.

They are in their 80s and 90s now, master photographers all. Some are photojournalists, some portraitists; some have specialized in fashion, others in news or sports or space. But they are of a breed, and of an extraordinary era. Each came of age in the 1930s or 40s, when grave and epic events—a depression and a World War—demanded to be witnessed by an urgent, accessible medium. At the time, photography was benefiting from a technological golden age that lent it increased flexibility and immediacy. Innovations included the portable 35-mm. camera (1925); the commercial flashbulb (1929), which replaced flash powder; and the Associated Press wirephoto (1935). “It was a very short period,” recalls photographer George Silk, now 84. “In the wave of a wand, here was photojournalism. [Few] professionals anywhere were using miniature cameras. Then [combat photographer] Bob Capa broke the dam, covering the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The public was being shown the world in a whole new look. Amazing.”

It was a time increasingly attuned to the medium’s power. The advertising boom and new printing techniques were dispersing photography ever more widely. The picture magazine, a product of 1920s Germany, became a cultural watershed in America with the birth of Life in 1936. And documentary photography was on the rise, thanks in part to the patronage of the Farm Security Administration, which dispatched a corps of photographers to cover the travails of rural Americans. The craft, it seemed, was acquiring a modicum of respect—or at least losing its sometimes unsavory status.

“In the 30s,” says Carl Mydans, 93, a veteran of Life and the F.S.A., “when you told someone your son or daughter was a photographer, generally they were not impressed. A writer was important. The perception was that a photographer wore a fedora with a police card in it. He was not very well dressed. He walked beside a handsome, articulate writer. And every now and then the writer would say, ‘Shoot that.’ Suddenly, when Life started up, photography became an important profession to the general public. Even glamorous.” Mydans’s cohort Gordon Parks concurs. “Around that time of the F.S.A.,” says Parks, 88, “the photographer became the star, showing poverty and affecting people. Dorothea Lange. [Margaret] Bourke-White. Walker Evans. [Marion] Post Wolcott. How could a writer compete with Arthur Rothstein’s Dust Bowl photo? The writer followed the photographer around.”

Nearly three generations later, many of the medium’s most august figures are still at it. Irving Penn, 83, shoots regularly for Vogue. Marty Lederhandler, 83, chases the news four days a week for the New rk bureau of the Associated Press. One of Japan’s deans of the image, Hiroshi Hamaya, is 85. Mexico’s Manuel Alvarez Bravo is 98. Luminaries such as the influential “street photographer” Helen Levitt, in her 80s, continue to exhibit their work, as do masters like aerial photographer William Garnett, 83, documentarian Wayne Miller, 82, architectural savant Julius Shulman, 90, and Ruth Bernhard, 95, known for her nudes and still lifes. (Two slightly younger colleagues seem indefatigable. Lennart Nilsson, who made his name photographing the human fetus, is still active at 78; fashion-and-portrait giant Richard Avedon is only 77.) One wonders if there isn’t something intrinsic to the profession that encourages longevity—maybe an elixir in the waters of the darkroom stop bath. “A lot of photographers go to a ripe old age,” notes Helmut Newton, who turned 80 in October. “Photography. Maybe it helps keep you virile.”

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Henri Cartier-Bresson, 92

It was photography's giant leap. That miraculous fraction of afternoon in 1932 when Henri Cartier-Bresson caught a passerby and his reflection (left) navigating their way across a puddle in the Place de I'Europe in Paris. In that instant, Cartier-Bresson perfected "the Decisive Moment," his term for the sublime split second when a scene achieves "equilibrium before the lens, and a photographer aligns "his brain, eye, and heart... on the same axis."

Some medical experts insist that creative types in general tend to live longer. “Look at [Edward] Steichen’s The Family of Man, ” says Dr. Gene Cohen, a specialist in geriatric psychiatry who often studies art and aging. “At 75, Steichen curated what many consider the greatest photo exhibition in history. Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt, published [when Alfred Eisenstaedt was] 86, is a classic example of this.”

In fact, the photographic act requires stamina, sensory acuity, the ability to make snap judgments and to handle equipment that can be delicate as well as bulky. These mental and physical demands, according to researchers, challenge both brain hemispheres and lengthen pathways between brain cells; this, in turn, may promote longer life. “u can infer from brain-science findings,” insists Cohen, “that older photographers would be high on the list of beneficiaries of brain activity because of all this leftand right-side stimulation. And a new study, selecting for older ‘couch potatoes’ who were [also] engaged in creative pursuits, suggests that activities of the kind photographers are drawn into seem to give a positive boost to the immune system. Which means better overall health and increased longevity.” Photographer Slim Aarons, 80, puts it another way: “A writer can make it up, sitting at his desk, boozing. A photographer has to be on the front lines. Your adrenaline is going. You use everything you have in your body and somehow it translates later on [in life].”

There may be something deeper still. Photographers have perspective. As a rule, they capture events or scenes that occur only once, for an extremely short spell. Yet their images allow others to share snippets of wrested time, for eternity. The best photographers have a gift for rendering the infinite within the instantaneous. “Everything I do before and as I click the shutter,” says portraitist Arnold Newman, 82, “comes from a lifetime of thinking and observing. I would like to think that it results in a richer, fuller, more perceptive life. I savor moments.”

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The Paris-based co-founder of the seminal Magnum photo agency, has a taste for mischief that has only sharpened with age. His rebellious pronouncements are delivered with a conviction both charming and disarming. "Focus is a bourgeois concept!" he announces, defending the merits of a slightly blurred print. "Photography never really interested me," he adds. "My big excitement was the fact of shooting. Once it's in the box, I couldn't care less." Having largely abandoned the camera in the early 1970s—to take up the sketchpad—Cartier-Bresson, who is married to photographer Martine Franck, shot several of the portraits for this story as part of his first ambitious U.S. assignment in 29 years.

Photographed by his wife near their home in Provence.

Willy Ronis, 90

"I was deeply influenced by painting," says Willy Ronis, who has been called "the most important living French photographer" for his celebratory depiction of his nation's working class. "Brueghel is close to how life appears to me," he explains. "When I am in the street, I see people moving like a ballet. You have the impression that a certain theater director is conducting. You have to be very attentive to find the fantastic moment when the balance is perfectly distributed in the viewfinder." These days Ronis, from his apartment-cum-studio in southeast Paris, has been preparing six exhibitions and a book that addresses, in part, the critical choices photographers make at the moment just before the shutter trips. "A type of echo occurs," he says, having noticed "very interesting parallels" between images he created decades apart. "Schemas of composition and reaction are repeated throughout your life but are not really conscious. Every work you're producing is a self-portrait."

Photographed in his Paris office on May 27, 2000.

Yousuf Karsh, 91

Some 60 years ago he plucked a cigar from Winston Churchill's scowling mouth, bringing on the thunder (above). Upon such audacious acts has the legend of Karsh of Ottawa, as he bills himself, been built. (Decades ago he dropped his first name, in the manner of early-20th-cenfury masters.) But as for his brashness with Churchill, the giant will have none of it. It was not audacity, he says, but ingenuity. "'Audacious' never enters my mind. Self-confident, yes. Self-assertive, yes." Through the use of chiseled light and abundant shadow, Karsh, like a sculptor, extracts the essential stature of the world's power brokers. In return, his name is now among his profession's most celebrated. "With the advent of celebrity photography," he notes, "the photographer, too, became an object of glamour. This can be seen on the older pages of this very magazine with the portraits by my friend and mentor, Edward Steichen." This winter Karsh mounts retrospectives in Germany and Japan, but the man who has had sittings with every president since Hoover says he no longer takes pictures. Come Inauguration Day, though, he may be tempted. "Both Gore and Bush are already handsome men," he remarked when the presidential race was still up in the air, "and when either one is elected, the full weight of being the most powerful man in the world will descend upon him and add an extra dimension of character and interest to his face."

Photographed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, near his home in Boston, on July 31, 2000.

Leni Riefenstahl, 98

Germany and Eastern Europe were a crucible for photographic talent between the wars. Then many budding photographers, including several in this portfolio, fled the Nazis, pursuing their work—and seeking refuge—in other lands. But Leni Riefenstahl, an actress turned filmmaker, stayed on and flourished, becoming the most influential visual propagandist of the Third Reich through now notorious documentaries such as Triumph of the Will. Later, after being exonerated by an Allied tribunal of war-related charges, she concentrated on still photography, turning her camera on anthropological subjects, including the Nuba tribesmen of Sudan, to produce what she called "biblical images which could have dated back to the earliest days of mankind." Leni Riefenstahl: Five Lives, a photobiography in bookstores this month, traces her controversial career. Still scorned in many quarters for images she created more than 60 years ago, she recently completed a diving (and underwater-video) expedition in the Maldives, off Sri Lanka.

Photographed at her home near Munich on June 26, 2000.

Helmut Newton, 80

"The photographic act is not sexual/' Helmut Newton insists. "When I photograph a naked woman, I can't mix the two. One is work, the other is not work." Which is more important, then, photography or sex? "Work is," he says. "Taking photos is more important than sex. Pushing the end of [your] 70s is different than when you're in your 30s." Newton's fame, nonetheless, has come from blending the two during his four decades shooting fashion for magazines such as French Vogue. At their best, his erotic mise en scenes, with their oppressively perfect models, thrill with a luxurious peril. Newton's images, many depicting nocturnal themes, seem to have been created on the vivid back lot of a dream. At age 12, he took his first camera into Berlin's subways; at 1 8, he fled Hitler's rise, settling in Asia, then France. Now based in Monte Carlo, he dovetails assignments—for Vanity Fair and others—with projects that are always writ large. Last year's Sumo was a 66-pound book of nudes and portraits; this fall, "Helmut Newton: Work" opened at Berlin's massive New National Gallery. Says Newton, who confesses to feeling transformed by the heart attack he survived in 1971, "The [show is] 60 percent new and fresh. I do laugh when very a la mode photographers do big retrospectives when they're 30. They'll do [my] retrospective when I'm dead."

Photographed in Paris on July 4, 2000.

Life Magazine Photographers

GORDON PARKS, 88, CARL MYDANS, 93, CORNELL CAPA, 82, and GEORGE SILK, 84

At a recent reunion and photo session, four former Life photographers trade gibes like truant schoolboys. "They're too old," objects Cornell Capa when asked to pose with his elders. "We shoot, we sit," harrumphs George Silk after a half-hour in front of the camera. "When do we get laid?!" Inevitably, though, talk turns to '36, when Life was launched. "It was an immediate sellout," says Carl Mydans, one of the first five shooters on staff. Mydans (interned as a P.O.W. by the Japanese) and Silk (later a pioneering sports photographer) covered battles in Europe and the Pacific, sometimes traveling in tandem. Capa, whose brother Robert may have been history's finest combat photographer, joined Life as a darkroom printer in 1938, then focused his camera on politics, religion, and social themes; a leading proponent of "concerned photography" (his phrase for work that addresses humanitarian issues), Capa founded New York's International Center of Photography in 1974.

Gordon Parks, like Mydans a novice when he started with the Farm Security Administration, became more famous than many of his subjects. A composer, artist, and film director (a sequel to his 1971 movie, Shaft, opened the week this photograph was taken), Parks was the subject of an HBO documentary in November and has just published his 17th book. But enough of noble deeds. What about the high jinks of Life's heyday? "You name it, it happened," Silk asserts.

"Throwing cherry bombs at three in the morning. A lion in a convertible. Dislocated my shoulder [playing] Rugby on Guy Fawkes Night. I was supposed to go the next morning with Byrd to the South Pole. We'd bust loose a little."

Photographed at the International Center of Photography Uptown in Manhattan on June 20, 2000.

Ozzie Sweet. 82

Ozzie Sweet lives in another age, or several The former B-movie actor (who began his career as a pirate in Cecil B. DeMille's 1942 film, Reap the Wild Wind) recently put his 1775 New Hampshire farmhouse up for sale He drives a refurbished, lime-green 1950 woody. He shoots almost every day, occasionally toting what he calls "a big, unwieldy 8-by-10 view camera that looks like something you'd use to cover the Civil War But in his heart of hearts it is always the summer of '52. For a magical stretch (1947 through the mid-60s), Sweet was crown prince of the sports portrait, his subjects always rendered in blazing Crayola and Lik-m Aid hues. Sweet would coax athletes into what he termed "simulated action -marvelously hokey charades-to suggest that he had frozen real movement on slow color film In fact, this Stylized technique, borrowed from Hollywood still photos, served to accentuate his pictures charming artifice His sportsmen were icons posing as icons And clients such as Neewsweek and Sport played along with the WSweetness of it all, "He's of an era where f being innocent was a good thing," says Nik Kleinberg, ESPN The Magazine s director of photography "And there s an uneven line from him to Annie Leibovitz. Lighting people outdoors, in color, that way, just wasn't done "

Photographed at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, California, on August 1, 2000.

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Slim Aarons, 80

Photographic folk wisdom, courtesy of Slim Aarons (right),the towering, ascot-prone, much-imitated chronicler of high society (most notably for Town & Country, Holiday, and Life}. On stature: "I'm six foot four. You're tall, you got it made. You walk in a room and you stand out like a peak. [L/fe's five-foot-four-inch Alfred] Eisenstaedt once told me, 'If I were your height, I'd be the king.'" On photo shoots: "Don't you realize? All a photographer needs today is a great-lookin' researcher—a smasher. Eighteen assistants is all bullshit. Bring along a beautiful girl Friday and you got the story." On photo-essays: "I'm not a master photographer. I'm a journalist with a camera. People forget. It isn't about one photograph, like magazines all publish today. We were storytellers. The editors looked at a goddamned shot and said, 'Where the hell is the opener? Where's the closer?"' On wealth: "A while ago [photo magnate] Mark Getty himself came to my house and took one look and bought my archives. I don't want to say for how much. That's the only way you have freedom in life: by having 'fuck you' money. Now I've got it. Remember that. And don't be a paid employee! I learned that from Gable."

Photographed outside his home in the town of Bedford, New York, on July 25, 2000.

Ralph Morse, 83

Ralph Morse covered the waterfront: He photographed ball games and heart surgery and war. He covered the Normandy invasion, and at Guadalcanal, he bobbed for six hours in a bloodied Pacific after the Vincennes, a U.S. cruiser he was sailing on, was torpedoed. "We were specialists in everything," says Morse, describing the long careers of his Life cronies, such as Loomis Dean, David Douglas Duncan, and Yale Joel, all in their 80s now. They had to be, since the whims of the news each week would determine their whereabouts-and subjects. Morse is best remembered for his definitive pictures of the fledgling Mercury astronauts, which helped propel the flyboys into orbit as national heroes. Ever true to his nautical and aeronautical roots, the irrepressible Morse lives in Florida (an easy drive from Cape Canaveral), where he often lolls on his boat, Lifetime, bought with the 1997 out-of-court settlement he received after spotting one of his photos (of Jackie Robinson stealing home in the 1955 Dodgers-Yankees World Series) on the back of a Wheaties box.

Photographed on his boat in Delray Beach, Florida, on July 24, 2000.

O. Winston Link, 85

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John Szarkowski put it best. MoMA's former director of photography considered O. Winston Link "a legitimate American genius and nut." Link (the O. is for Ogle) is known for his obsessively orchestrated studies of steam engines at night, shot in the 1950s. (Imagine scenes by Fritz Lang or Diane Arbus—with a touch of Rube Goldberg.) By rigging up elaborate, synchronized flash arrays, Link would create the illusion that he had suspended a hurtling locomotive, like some phantom dragon, against the ink-black sky of a rural-Southeast station. His pictures helped preserve a vanishing mode of transport; the specimen here (left) is now a relic warehoused by the Norfolk Southern Corp. What charmed him most about the A-class engine, so prominent in his classic drive-in photo (above), his most reproduced image? "The size of it," he says. "The smell of it. The power that it has. The load that it hauls— 17,000 tons or more. The places it goes. It's great to hear it. Such a beautiful whistle. They call it a hooter. I have recordings on reel-to-reel of different A-class engines. I own the number plate off that engine: 1242. But that was stolen along with all my other stuff." (His ex-wife, Conchita, is currently doing time for grand larceny, having filched some 1,400 of his photos.) Link has settled in Westchester County, New York, and galleries now dispense his prints. "This tomato came in [once]," he says of actress (and photographer) Diane Keaton, "and wanted to buy a couple of my pictures. I didn't know who she was. Do now."

Photographed at Norfolk Southern's locomotive shop in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 2, 2000.

Lillian Bassman, 83

Lillian Bassman has come full circle. In the 40s, as a young art director working with design maverickAlexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, she liked to sneak into the nearby darkroom of portraitist George Hoyningen-Huene on her lunch hours. "I would dream up new ways of printing photographs," she says of those forays. Now she's doing her print manipulations by computer: "It's fun to experiment with it.* Bassman's breakthrough fashion photographs in the 40s and 50s were fluid, ethereal, often gauzily focused. In the 70s and 80s, after destroying the bulk of her workprints and negatives—in one grand purge, she began to concentrate on abstracts, nudes, and still lifes. She continues to shoot for magazines such as German Vogue, and encourages the efforts of photographer Lizzie Himmel—her daughter.

Photographed in New York City on July 28, 2000.

Eve Arnold, 87

Intending to practice medicine, Eve Arnold picked up her first camera in 1948—a gift from a boyfriend—and turned photojournalist instead. Soon she was studying with Alexey Brodovitch (design oracle of Harper's Bazaar), shooting photo-essays on race and society, and traveling incessantly. "I'd call up The (London] Sunday Times Magazine,* she remembers, "and say, 'I want to go to Afghanistan for a story on veiled women.' The art director, Michael Rand, wouldn't ask the cost. He'd just want to make sure you'd be back for the Christmas party." Arnold shuttled between London (her base since 1961) and Zululand, India, and Hollywood, as a member of the esteemed Magnum photo agency. She covered 40 movies. producing classic picture stories on Joan Crawford (who would often arrive for their sessions emboldened by 140-proof vodka) and Marilyn Monroe (who during one interview with a reporter, in Arnold's presence, insisted on brushing her hair as they spoke—her pubic hair). Arnold says she's busy "making words" now, having just finished two new photo books, though her camera's always at hand. "I'm still getting offers," she notes. "Ralph Fiennes called yesterday—we're on kissing terms, you know, kiss-kiss at a party—to ask me to photograph him." Whomever Arnold shoots she portrays with dignity. "If somebody lends you their face," she says, "you owe it to them not to savage them."

Photographed at the Reform Club in London on February 1, 1998.

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Today, photography is in flux, Never has the image played a more ubiquitous role in popular culture. Never has photo “content” been a more attractive cur—I— rency, as media companies snap up photo rights, and collectors vie for vintage prints and picture archives. In fact, a new format (the digital camera) and a new medium (the Internet) could have as profound an effect on photography as did the portable camera and the picture magazine more than half a century ago. Say cheese long enough and even film itself may be no more. “The drama of it all does not escape me,” asserts Hollywood photographer Phil Stern, 81. “I no longer have brown fingernails. We no longer use wet chemicals in the lab. I use a computer mouse and Photoshop. The only thing wet now is the cold drink at your computer. I envy the younger guys who have all this at their disposal.”

Each year, however, we lose a few more seers. Celebrity photographer Jean Howard, portraitist Gisele Freund, Life’s Ed Clark and John Florea, and Nat Fein, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Babe Ruth “farewell” shot—all in their 80s—passed away in the last 12 months. Graciously, they leave behind their distinct visions for all time. Their peers are pictured here: elder lensmen whose art, thankfully, still flourishes, helping us appreciate our time, and time itself.

Joe Rosenthal, 89

On February 23, 1945, fortune mustered five Marines and a medic around a flag at the summit of Iwojima's Mount Suribachi—and right into the path of a waiting Speed Graphic. The moment, caught by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, became a symbol of World War II and an icon of American heroism. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize, its human tableau reproduced on stamps and fashioned into granite and bronze. Last summer, Flags of Our Fathers, a memoir about the six men in the photo, co-authored by one of their sons, hit No. 1 on the New York Times's nonfiction best-seller list. "The picture, the picture," sighs Rosenthal, weary of the fuss. "I didn't win that war. Forgive me if I say I'm tired of the whole thing." But given half a chance, he will speak volumes, with a wry smile and great pride, about that instant of valor snagged in 1/400 of a second half a century ago. "To this day," he says, "I get a kind of jolt. I remember feeling, That's my flag up there. I was brought up on flag-waving. I was seven when the troops returned from World War I and paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue." Today, Rosenthal is frail, living in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, across the bay from his daughter. "I get through all right," he says. "But I've always dreamed of having a little farm. Maybe some other time."

Photographed near his apartment in San Francisco on June 24, 2000.