Happy Birthday, Tony Vaccaro!
“Living legend” may be an overused term, but it definitely applies to New York’s Tony Vaccaro. He is one of the last surviving US soldiers who took part in the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944 - with a firearm in one hand and an Argus C-3 XNUMXmm camera in the other. With this apparatus, Tony Vaccaro became the chronicler of the final months of the war in Europe. That was the beginning of an unusual, perhaps unique career: from fighting front-line soldier to award-winning photo reporter in the post-war period.
“I wanted to show the world the real side of war” (Tony Vaccaro)
After the surrender he remained in Germany until 1948. On behalf of the military newspaper “The Stars and Stripes” he documented life in the destroyed cities and the beginning of reconstruction. “I had a mission that I wanted to accomplish,” he once said. “I wanted to collect evidence against the war, the senselessness, the destruction.”
He returned to New York in April 1948. But the escalating East-West conflict gave him no peace. “I believed World War III was imminent and wanted to be where it happened,” he recalled. “On August 29, 1948, I arrived in Frankfurt and photographed the airlift as a prelude to a new war rather than a good deed on the part of the United States and the Western Allies.”
Successful career as a photo reporter in the post-war period
After returning to the USA in 1950, he worked as a freelance fashion and lifestyle photographer for some of the most important magazines of the time, including “Look”, “Life”, “Harper's Bazaar”, “Newsweek” and “Quick”. He received numerous high awards for his reports, including the “Art Director's Gold Medal” (1963) and the “World Press Photo Gold Medal” (1969).
Retrospective 1999
On the initiative of Reinhard Schultz, the director of the Berlin gallery Bilderwelt, Tony Vaccaro's almost forgotten photographs of destroyed Germany during the "zero hour" and the years of reconstruction were shown in a traveling exhibition, which was also presented by the Schleswig City Museum. Tony Vaccaro came especially from New York for the opening on July 11, 1999.
His catalog of works now includes over 250 exhibitions, ten books and two major films, including “Underfire” from 2016. In 2014 he opened the Tony Vaccaro Museum in Bonefro (Italy) and a year later, at the age of 93, his own photography studio in New York City. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Library of Congress in Washington.
Today, December 20, 2017, the photographer from New York celebrates his 95th birthday. Happy birthday, Tony!
