I’ve commented here on several photographers who died in 2014, including Lewis Balz and Rene Burri. Among those I thought about but didn’t get around to writing anything at the time, though I have written about them previously, were Ray Metzker, Rebecca Lepkoff and Arthur Leipzig and you can read a little more about them and a number of others in the Time Lightbox ‘In Memoriam‘ feature.
Lepkoff and Leipzig both studied with the New York Photo League in the 1940s, and were 98 and 96 respectively. The Photo League was arguably the most important organisation in American photography of the last century, the basis of a New York school which led to the US domination of much of photography. As well as the many distinguished photographers who taught or studied there, its influnece on younger photographers was enormous, despite (or perhaps aided by) its ruthless dismemberment under McCarthy-ism. I was pleased in the early years of this century to write about it at some length, as well as about many of the photographers associated with it, at a time when it seemed to have been forgotten by many. You can see and hear Leipzig in the trailer to ‘Ordinary Miracles’ a 2012 film about the Photo League, along with other former students in their 80s and 90s.
But among the photographers whose deaths have made headlines in the past year were a number of much younger photojournalists, with 16 photographers among the 60 journalists listed as killed by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reporters Without Borders make the tally a little higher at 66, and they also report that 178 journalists and 178 citizen-journalists were in prison around the world on 8th December 2014. I’m not sure that the distinction between journalists and citizen-journalists is any longer valid, but the figures for deaths and imprisonment put my own complaints about our police here and their treatment of the press into perspective. Though of course even if the risks are lower, fighting for the freedom of the press is still vital.
You can read more about the photographers who were killed at the links above, but I want to highlight one of these, Luke Somers, simply because, although I never met him, he worked for the same agency that I use. An American freelance in Yemen, he was kidnapped in September and held hostage by Al-Qaeda and was killed during a failed rescue attempt by US special forces on December 6, 2014. You can see his work on Demotix, where he had submitted 98 stories from Yemen since 2011.
