As far as luminaries go in the world of photography, John G. Morris is Olympian. As the London photo editor of Life magazine during World War II, Morris worked closely with the likes of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson to publish now-iconic images of Europe besieged. Later, in positions at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, his discerning eye set the bar for topnotch photojournalism.
On April 30, Morris’s personal collection of photos goes under the gavel at Paris’s Drouot-Montaigne auction house. The “photo diary” represents the pulse and flow of the 20th century. Here’s Capa, snapping Hemingway in a revealing pose in April 1944; here he is two months later, catching the D-Day landing in Normandy. Here’s liberated Paris and Moscow. Here’s Dorothea Lange and her hardened, dirty American migrants—and the rest of postwar America, with its chipper housewives and bustling Main Streets, its busy barbershops and railroad cars. The collection captures history’s greats—Roosevelts, Kennedys, Einstein, and Castro—and the humble, from poker players and Kansas wheat farmers to Vietnamese soldiers and a Slovakian Gypsy groom. NEWSWEEK presents, in Morris’s words, selections from his treasure trove:
Photographs courtesy of the John G. Morris Collection, for further reproduction contact Magnum Photos.
