Bernard Gotfryd

Bernard Gotfryd (May 25, 1924 – June 3, 2016) was a Polish-born American photographer, primarily associated with Newsweek, for which he photographed celebrities, politicians, artists, and writers.

Early life

Born into a Jewish family in Radom, Gotfryd was 15 at the time of the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He watched his mother taken away, eventually to die in a concentration camp, and his grandmother's remains roll past in a pile of Jewish bodies on a cart. He spent most of the war working at a photo laboratory that developed pictures taken by German officers, some of which he smuggled to members of the Polish resistance. He was eventually captured, and spent the final period of the war as a slave laborer in the quarries of the Gusen concentration camp at Mauthausen. He reunited with his brother, whom he initially failed to recognize, and sister after the war. Several years later, in 1947, he emigrated to the United States, where he married a fellow survivor from Radom, in March 1952. He was drafted into the United States Army Signal Corps in 1949, where he was trained as a combat photographer.

Career

Following his army service, Gotfryd was hired as a photographer by Newsweek. Though many of his assignments consisted of photographing movie stars and newsmakers wherever he could find them, his distinctive perspective was more apparent when he had more time. Assigned to photograph the controversial novelist William Styron, as Styron's daughter Alexandra later remembered, Gotfryd went beyond the assignment to capture the "cultural dissonance" of family life at Styron's home with "subtle candor." In some cases he developed personal relationships with his famous subjects. Sent by Newsweek to shoot Nina Simone, he eventually became a close friend; Simone introduced him to James Baldwin as "the best photographer in the world." A print of Gotfryd's photograph of Simone and Baldwin is now housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Late writing

Inspired by a 1983 visit to Poland, his first since his emigration, and his mother's exhortation the last day he saw her to "tell the world what the Nazis were doing," Gotfryd began writing brief stories of his memories of his childhood and the Holocaust. These stories were eventually published as ''Anton, the Dove-Fancier: And Other Tales of the Holocaust'' in 1990. A selection of his photographs, with the title ''The Intimate Eye'', was published in 2006. Upon his death, his photographs, which he willed to the public, were donated to the Library of Congress.

Gallery

File:David Ben-Gurion, half-length portrait, seated-ppmsca-12400-12432u.tif, David Ben-Gurion
File:William Styron by Bernard Gotfryd edit.jpg, William Styron
File:Kurt Vonnegut by Bernard Gotfryd (1965).jpg, Kurt Vonnegut
File:Salvador Dali, gtfy.01021.jpg, Salvador Dalí
File:Lauren Bacall by Bernard Gotfryd.jpg, Lauren Bacall
File:Muhammad Ali 1975.jpg, Muhammad Ali
File:Andy Warhol at the Jewish Museum, gtfy.00023.jpg, Andy Warhol
File:Rudolph Giuliani, D.A., NYC (06).jpg, Rudolph Giuliani
File:Steve Jobs (Apple computer) (LOC).jpg, Steve Jobs
File:Dan Rather at CBS, 1984 election set, N.Y.C.jpg, Dan Rather
File:Donald Trump in the 1980s.jpg, Donald Trump

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Gotfryd, Bernard
1924 births
2016 deaths
Photographers from New York City
Polish photojournalists
People from Radom
Polish Holocaust survivors
United States Army Signal Corps personnel
Polish emigrants to the United States
American photojournalists
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
Mauthausen concentration camp survivors
20th-century Polish photographers
21st-century Polish photographers
Newsweek people