The story on rock stars with their parents was a natural. A number of the same stars I'd found very distasteful and uncooperative were very cooperative around their parents. They were all scared of them—or at least wanted to act like human beings—in front of their parents.

10.04.2012[ read full story ]

Asked to name a favorite picture Cornell Capa recalled he was in Moscow when Boris Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. (The poet’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, had been smuggled abroad and published in Italy a year earlier but was still banned in the Soviet Union.) Accept...

22.03.2012[ read full story ]

Life magazine gave me the assignment to do “The Cats of Africa.” I had photographed some animals before, though I certainly wasn't a cat expert, but I could hire people who knew things. They’d lined up a hunter in Botswana, who was a hunter for zoos.

15.03.2012[ read full story ]

For the 1956 Jet Age issue of Life magazine, I wanted to photograph the afterburners of some fighter jets going into the sunset—three red balls up here and one red ball down there. I thought that would be terrific. I was with a not-too-experienced pilot. We got up to 4...

07.03.2012[ read full story ]

I lived with Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, he later became her husband, from late 1941 until after the end of the war. It was sort of a ménage à trois, but Roland was in the British army, and so the ménage à trois became a ménage à deux. After the liberation of Paris, Lee and I liv...

01.03.2012[ read full story ]

John Olson: I was drafted and went to Vietnam in the infantry. But when I arrived, I got myself transferred to Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper that the Department of Defense put out for the military.

23.02.2012[ read full story ]

The new installation for the Société Générale Collection was designed by Régis Durand, former Director of the Jeu de Paume and independent exhibition curator. It is his third intervention, it allows the collection to be discovered or rediscovered. This time, Durand selec...

15.02.2012[ read full story ]

Fresh from working with Roy Stryker at the Department of the Interior's Resettlement Administration, gentlemanly Carl Mydans found himself in Hollywood, covering the movie industry with new, precision made 35mm cameras and taking pictures off-the-cuff. He struck fear in the hearts of pro...

09.02.2012[ read full story ]

Harry Benson: I liked the King of Spain. He's the way that royalty should be. Not at all like the British royal family. I've stood in the British royal yacht for hours on end, and nobody's ever given me a drink of water. The King of Spain came over and gave me his sherry. And he cam...

01.02.2012[ read full story ]

Andreas Feininger, the son of painter Lyonel Feininger, trained to be an architect and became a particularly thoughtful photographer. To flatten the perspective in cityscapes, he constructed special camera bodies and tripods for use with very long lenses. Wi...

25.01.2012[ read full story ]