Abigail Heyman, a photographer whose stark portraits of women at work, at home and at weddings gave a visual concreteness to feminist doctrine of the 1970s about the oppressiveness of traditional female roles, died on May 28 at her home in Manhattan. She was 70.
The cause was heart failure, said her son, Lazar Bloch.
Ms. Heyman was known best for her 1974 book, “Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal,” a sort of illustrated encyclopedia of women performing self-limiting roles. In claustrophobic black-and-white images of almost clinical detail, she portrayed women in curlers shopping for groceries; women as spectators, watching men do things they enjoy; a nude dancer at a strip joint flat on her back, legs apart; a woman at a kitchen table in an apparent stupor of fatigue, a wailing baby on the changing table nearby; little girls playing with dolls.
In one of the book’s most arresting images, Ms. Heyman photographed herself undergoing an abortion.
Her book, she said, was “one feminist’s point of view” of the narrow range of choices women had in their lives, which she hoped her work would help to expand. Frequently displayed in women’s bookstores — in the heyday of women’s bookstores — next to the best-selling feminist guidebook “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” Ms. Heyman’s “Growing Up Female” sold more than 35,000 copies, an unusually high number for photograph collections.
A 1978 book, “Butcher, Baker, Cabinetmaker,” was devoted to working women, and in “Dreams & Schemes: Love and Marriage in Modern Times” (1987), Ms. Heyman explored weddings — she attended 200 — with an eye for backstage drama that anticipated the granular detail, minus the bad taste, of reality television.
In photos and accompanying essays, she portrayed a bride being forced to choose between her divorced parents because one would not come if the other was invited; the parents of a groom who were glum throughout a ceremony because the bride planned to keep her own name; the stir among a groom’s tables when two former lovers of the bride showed up at the reception.
Ms. Heyman was also a photojournalist, her work appearing in Time, Life, Ms., Harpers and The New York Times Magazine. In the mid-1980s she was director of the documentary and photojournalism department at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. She was one of the first women admitted to the prestigious photographer’s cooperative Magnum, founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and others.
Joan Liftin, the photojournalism director at the photography center from 1988 to 2000, called Ms. Heyman’s work an amalgam of personal, journalistic and political insight.
“As a feminist, she was not so much about marching,” Ms. Liftin said. “She took pictures that showed what the marching was about.”
Abigail Heyman was born on Aug. 1, 1942, in Danbury, Conn., the first of two children of Annette and Lazarus Heyman. Her father was a real estate developer. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, N.Y., in 1964 and had her first photography exhibit in Manhattan in 1972. She was twice divorced. Besides her son, her mother is her only survivor.
“I have been a girl child and, in my expectations, a mother,” Ms. Heyman wrote in her first book. “I have tried to be prettier than I am. I have been treated as a sex object, and at times I have encouraged that. I have been married and have seen my husband’s work as more important than my own.”
Her work as a photographer, she said, reflected “the conflicts inherent in growing up female” and “the conflicts inherent in trying to change.”
Martin Arnold, Former Times Journalist, Dies at 84
Por Paul Vitello [The New York Times, 6/6/13]
Martin Arnold, a former reporter, editor and columnist for The New York Times whose assignments took him to the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the mountains of the Yukon, the capital of 1960s hippie culture and the corridors of the publishing world, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Dr. Mark Arnold said.
In a 40-year career with the paper, Mr. Arnold was an editor for The New York Times Magazine, oversaw The Times’s coverage of the news media and, beginning in October 1997, wrote “Making Books,” a column about the publishing industry. His last — “No. 212,” he wrote — appeared in March 2003.
As a reporter, Mr. Arnold was the quintessential generalist in an era before specialty beats. On one assignment, he traveled with the circus; on another, he explored municipal corruption in New York City, earning a George Polk Award in 1968 for his reporting. He wrote about racial unrest in Brooklyn, Mafia wars and the rise of Malcolm X.
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, he tracked down the probation officers who had tried to help Lee Harvey Oswald when he was a troubled teenager living with his mother in the Bronx.
In 1965, Mr. Arnold covered Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s ascent of Mount Kennedy, a 13,900-foot peak in the Yukon named in the president’s honor. In 1967, Mr. Arnold spent time living in Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco neighborhood at the heart of hippie culture in America.
When Marines landed in the Dominican Republic in 1965 during a period of political unrest, Mr. Arnold was sent to a war zone for the first time, and his dispatches conveyed the scene through the eyes of a self-possessed New Yorker:
“The United States Marines have Howitzers on the front lawn and a heliport on the polo field,” he wrote standing outside a luxury hotel, “and hundreds of refugees sleep nightly amid the mirrored columns of the lobby, where Ginger Rogers might dance atmidnight if only someone would clean up the mess.”
He was born Martin Katske on May 14, 1929, in Manhattan to Arnold and Evelyn Katske, and raised on Long Island. After his father’s death, his mother changed the family name to Arnold. Martin and a younger brother, William, both adopted it.
While still in high school, Marty, as he was known, was a copy boy at The Times before dropping out of school to enlist in the Army in 1945. He earned his high school diploma in the military and a bachelor’s degree from what was then Adelphi College in Garden City, on Long Island. He was a reporter for Newsday and The New York Herald Tribune before joining the reporting staff of The Times in 1959.
In addition to his son Mark, Mr. Arnold is survived by another son, Christopher; his brother, William; and two grandsons. His marriage to Irmgard Arnold ended in divorce in the early 1980s.
After retiring, Mr. Arnold wrote a series of essays, “Traditions of The Times,” for the newspaper’s employee Web page, in which he described the days of typewriters, white shirts and neckties, and overflowing ashtrays and how the newsroom had changed, becoming more racially diverse, more female and more electronic.
His last “Making Books” column was a paean to the relationship between writers and readers. “What should be remembered is that books are the adventure,” he wrote, “not the making of books,” then cited Emerson’s observation, “ ’Tis the good reader that makes the good book.”
“This column has not been for the few hundred in the publishing industry — who often haven’t liked it — but for that good reader,” Mr. Arnold wrote. “I know a woman, who happens to be a writer, who always carries a book with her wherever she goes. This column was written for readers like her.”
Don Oliver, NBC Correspondent, Dies at 76
Por Daniel E. Slotnik [The New York Times, 1/6/13]
Don Oliver, who reached a nightly national audience as a correspondent covering major events for NBC News for more than 25 years, died on Tuesday in Spokane, Wash. He was 76.
The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his wife, the former Shirley Humphrey, said.
Mr. Oliver worked for NBC Nightly News from the mid-1960s until 1992. As a national correspondent, he covered the civil rights movement, including the assassination and funeral of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and nearly a generation’s worth ofpolitical conventions and campaigns.
Mr. Oliver went abroad to report on conflicts in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; the Middle East peace talks in 1977; and the Civil War in El Salvador.
In the 1980s he focused on environmental issues in the United States, notably the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
Donald Lynn Oliver was born on July 14, 1937, in Billings, Mont. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montana’s School of Journalism and a master’s from Columbia University’s journalism school. He worked for local television stations until NBC made him its Midwest correspondent.
After he retired from NBC he worked as a media consultant and taught journalism at the University of Montana.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter from a previous marriage to Sharon Nelson, Cherie Ash; a stepson, Jeff Humphrey; a stepdaughter, Claire Humphrey; a sister, Kate Oliver; four grandchildren and four stepgrandchildren.
Mr. Oliver worried that the 24-hour news cycle was hurting television journalism.
“The rush to be first on the air,” he said in a 1999 interview, “has robbed television news of its ability to reflect.”
Wayne Miller, Photographer of War and Peace, Dies at 94
Por William Yardley[The New York Times, 26/5/13]
Wayne Miller, a photographer whose intimate images from the front lines of war, the streets of Chicago’s South Side and his own family life captured a world in transition in the middle of the 20th century, died on Wednesday at his home in Orinda, Calif. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his granddaughter Inga Miller Gilbert.
Mr. Miller, the Chicago-born son of a doctor and a nurse, was given a camera as a high school graduation present and a few years later enrolled in art school. Quickly determining that it did not suit him, he joined the Navy, and that, perhaps surprisingly, was where he got his first real chance to do what he wanted to do: “to photograph mankind,” he once put it, “and explain man to man.”
Mr. Miller was one of a half-dozen photographers asked by the photographer and curator Edward Steichen to join a special Navy photography unit he had formed during World War II. Mr. Miller traveled the world in his new role, capturing American soldiers in battle from the Philippines to the south of France, hopscotching his way through combat zones with rare freedom for a soldier.
He was among the first Americans to photograph Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. One of his best-known images is of a wounded airman being pulled from a damaged plane. Mr. Miller had been scheduled to be on that plane; a photographer who had asked to replace him was killed.
After the war, Mr. Miller returned to Chicago, where, living on grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, he spent three years photographing black life on the city’s South Side in the wake of the Great Migration of blacks from the South. He photographed construction workers, families living in shanties, a little girl on crutches. He did not treat his subjects as art objects; he identified them, if not by name then by their job or task or where they lived. The project was formally titled “The Way of Life of the Northern Negro.”
“His pictures have none of that title’s polite anthropological squeamishness,” the critic Margo Jefferson wrote in 2001 in The New York Times about “Chicago’s South Side: 1946-1948,” a book by Mr. Miller published in 2000 that featured images from the project.
“Miller’s work is intimate but never presumptuous; each black-and-white image retains its mystery,” Ms. Jefferson wrote. “You realize there is more to know about this community than a camera’s eye — or ours — can find. It is part of his gift that he knows this, too.”
Mr. Steichen recruited Mr. Miller again in the early 1950s to help him organize an ambitious exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “The Family of Man.” That show, which included more than 500 photographs taken by more than 250 photographers in 68 countries, was intended, as Carl Sandburg wrote in a prologue to a book of the same name, to portray “one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.”
The exhibition, and the book published shortly afterward, included a series of pictures that Mr. Miller had made showing his wife, Joan, in labor, then giving birth, then nursing their son David. The doctor delivering David is Mr. Miller’s father, who had given him that first camera.
Wayne Forest Miller was born on Sept. 19, 1918. He studied banking at what is now the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later enrolled at the Art Institute of Los Angeles.
Mr. Miller worked as a freelance photographer for Life, Ebony, National Geographic and other publications for many years. He also took pictures for “A Baby’s First Year,” by Dr. Benjamin Spock and John B. Reinhart. In 1958 he published “The World Is Young,” which captured the lives of his four children growing up in Orinda. From 1962 to 1968 he was president of the Magnum Photos collective.
In addition to his granddaughter Ms. Gilbert, his survivors include his wife of 70 years, the former Joan Baker; four children, Jeanette, David, Peter and Dana Blencowe; eight other grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Mr. Miller largely stopped working as a professional photographer in the 1970s and took up the cause of protecting ancient redwood forests in Northern California. He replanted many acres of trees on his own land and helped found Forest Landowners of California, which successfully lobbied for changes to state laws to encourage forest preservation.
Kennett Love, Times Correspondent in 1950s, Dies at 88
Por Daniel E. Slotnik [The New York Times, 18/5/13]
Kennett Love, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times who covered tumultuous events in the Middle East in the early days of the cold war, died Monday in Southampton, N.Y. He was 88.
The cause was respiratory failure, his partner, Blair Seagram, said.
Mr. Love was in Tehran in August 1953 when the C.I.A. executed a successful plot to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and replace him with Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a loyalist to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had close ties to the United States.
Mr. Love’s reporting may have played a small part in the coup. He and a reporter for The Associated Press wrote about decrees signed by the Shah that called for General Zahedi to replace Mr. Mossadegh. The release of the decrees, which helped legitimize the coup, was engineered by the C.I.A., though Mr. Love insisted later that he had been unaware of the agency’s involvement.
While he was based in Cairo in 1954, he wrote front-page articles about the discovery, near the Great Pyramid at Giza, of a 50-foot boat that had been intended to convey the spirit of the pharaoh Cheops to the underworld.
He also covered the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 and wrote a book about it, “Suez: The Twice-Fought War,” published in 1969.
Kennett Farrar Potter Love was born in St. Louis on Aug. 17, 1924. He attended Princeton University and was a pilot in the Navy Air Corps during World War II. After the war, he married Felicite Pratt, in 1946 (she died in 2002), and continued his studies at Columbia University. His newspaper career began at The Hudson-Dispatch in Union City, N.J. He joined The Times in 1948, working in the morgue before becoming a reporter in 1950.
Mr. Love is survived by two daughters, Mary Christy Love Sadron and Suzanna Potter Love; two sons, John and Nicholas; two sisters, Mary Lehmann and Nathalie Love; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Love left The Times in 1962 to cover culture and foreign affairs for the magazine USA1, which went out of business after five issues. He later taught journalism at the American University in Cairo and worked for the Peace Corps.
Mr. Love regarded his book on the Suez crisis in part as a return to unfinished business, and as an example that other journalists might follow.
“If they are unable to penetrate the secrecy with which officialdom seeks to cloak its enterprises,” he wrote in the preface, “they should go back as historians to make the record whole and clear.”