30 AN INCREDIBLE LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY TONY VACCARO Visitors to Manducatis Rustica in Long Island City will be familiar with Vaccaro’s work. A large number of his celebrity photographs adorn the walls. Georgia O’Keefe, Lauren Bacall, Marcel Marceau, Max Ernst and a commanding portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright. These, however, are a mere tantalizing glimpse of over 1,000 portraits taken by Vaccaro in his career which began in the U.S. Army during World War II. His first major assignment was to photograph the impact of the Americans in Germany. These magnificent photographs formed the basis of a Taschen published book Entering Germany. After returning to the U.S. and dropping out of college – “I felt like I knew everything,” he said – Vaccaro travelled around the country in a 1943 Chevrolet. One day he saw a copy of Business Week magazine with Fleur Cowles on the cover. He approached her for work and she hired him straight away. He started with Flair, and was quickly booked for photographic assignments by Life, Look and the other great publications of that period. interview THE COURIER/Photos by Rosa Kim BY ALAN CAPPER “I want a great person. Somebody who gives something to humanity.” That’s how Tony Vaccaro chose his subjects for his photography in a career spanning over 70 years. He has used this criteria to capture the essence of some of the 20th century’s most iconic figures. They include Pablo Picasso (“I wanted to see if what his wife had written about him was true. It wasn’t”), Salvador Dali (“He kept me waiting for two hours, and I scolded him for it”), Jackson Pollock (“I teased him that he would be known as a paint dripper so he painted me a face”) and Frank Lloyd Wright (“He was simply one of the greatest men I knew.”)
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