On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Christine Aguila <[email protected]> wrote: > Having spent the last week reading page by page this lovely 605 page book > published by Thames & Hudson (paperback 2009), I'd like to recommend it to > PDML folks. Organized in alpha order, included is a brief biographical > sketch of 88 photographers who were on Life's staff and, of course, photos > made by the photographer. > > So many of the photographers have passed away, which would follow given > Life's run from 1936-1972. The brief sketches do a great job of revealing > the dedication and personality of the photographers, especially in their > coverage of World War II. > > I'd like to share this brief biography of George Strock (1911-1977): > > " . . . Stroke joined LIFE and went off to the war in the Pacific. Initially > he cabled editors that he saw so little action he was ready to quit and open > a peanut stand. Other photographers did leave, but Strock stayed on for the > Battle of Buna, which cost more than 3,000 Allied lives. On that malarial > New Guinea island, Strock scrambled along side the soldiers. . . . At the > time, censors banned showing any dead American soldiers, but LIFE raised the > point with the government, and FDR himself decided the public was growing > complacent and should see some of the reality; thus 'Three Dead Americans' > ran in LIFE." > > I find that last bit about FDR very interesting. Cheers, Christine
I didn't enjoy high school much - not the "academic" side of things anyway. Once during a spare I was in the library and discovered that we had bound volumes of every Life mag from Margaret Bourke-White's first cover in 1936 (I still remember it's Fort Peck Dam) to about the late fifties or early sixties. I spent many spares after that poring over those issues. Damned if I didn't learn more history from those than I did in 5 years of high school history classes. And of course, there were the photographs! I was already interested in photography, but leafing through those marvelous pages crystallized my hobby into something of an obsession. I think I'd really enjoy this book, Christine. Thanks for the recommendation. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
