E-Photo
Issue #108  7/17/2006
 
Obituaries: Arnold Newman, Robert Heinecken and Catherine Leroy

ARNOLD NEWMAN died in New York City at the age of 88. A noted portraitist, Newman had photographed every sitting President since Harry Truman, with the exception of the current President. Born in 1918, he became a freelance photographer for magazines like Fortune, Life, Newsweek, and Esquire, among others. His professional work began, however, in Miami and West Palm Beach in 1938, where his photographs of the urban poor were somewhat of a departure from his more structured environmental portraits. In 1945 Newman moved to New York where he remained until his death.

ROBERT HEINECKEN passed away at the end of May at the age of 74 from pneumonia. He was an artist and teacher whose work radically expanded the range of possibilities for photography as art. In one of his best known artistic performances Heinecken bought numerous copies of a current edition of Time magazine in 1969 and then, after adding his own antiwar images adapted from horrific news photos from the conflict, put them back on the newsstand shelves for unsuspecting customers. LA Times reporter Christopher Knight explained: "The pages of Heinecken's guerrilla "special edition" included superimposed lithographic prints of a recently published photograph showing a smiling soldier holding the decapitated heads of two anonymous Vietnamese youths. The shocking image was repeated indiscriminately over fashion advertisements and editorial news copy throughout the magazines. Between 1969 and 1994, he made 37 editions of variously collaged and overprinted magazines." There will be a memorial service in Los Angeles held on August 12 from 10 am-noon at the Charles E. Young Grand Salon in Kerckhoff UCLA.

CATHERINE LEROY, a war photojournalist, died in Santa Monica from cancer at age 60. Leroy worked for the Gamma and Sipa photo agencies and sold her work to the Associated Press and United Press International. Her photos appeared in publications worldwide, including Life magazine. She won a George Polk award for her Vietnam work in 1967 and was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Award for her coverage of the civil war in Lebanon in 1976. Last year, she edited the Random House book "Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam".