Once again, football season is upon us, and once again, the occasion brings with it all the marketing mayhem, fan frenzy and trash-talking that sports are so often heir to. Pro football is unique among American sports due to its sheer, outsized spectacle. It’s louder than baseball, brasher than basketball, and more routinely violent than the phenomenally physical sport of NHL hockey and the high-speed lunacy of NASCAR. In fact, of all the major sports in North America, football is arguably the one that brings out whatever vestiges of machismo might be lurking in even the most seemingly mild of fans.
Football, after all, is for manly men. But there are many types of toughness. Mental toughness (Jackie Robinson); quiet toughness (Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper); gritty toughness (a weary, determined American Marine); crazy, spasmodic toughness (Cagney’s sociopath, Cody Jarrett, in White Heat); run-right-over-you toughness (Jim Brown); and on and on.
Here, LIFE.com offers a look back at some of the iconic faces and personalities that, in their own time and in their own chosen pursuit, were tough enough to answer that age-old question: Who’s the man?
John Garfield 1938
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marine on Saipan 1944
W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jimmy Stewart 1945
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Kirk Douglas 1949
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
C.H. Long 1949
Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gary Cooper 1949
Peter Stackpole Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
James Cagney 1949
Allan Grant Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando 1949
Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackie Robinson 1950
J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gregory Peck 1950
W. Eugene Smith Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Humphrey Bogart 1951
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Rocky Marciano 1951
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ernest Hemingway 1952
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Spencer Tracy 1955
J.R. Eyerman Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mickey Mantle 1956
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mercury Astronauts 1959
Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Burt Lancaster 1959
Grey Villet Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frank Sinatra 1961
Leonard McCombe Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen 1963
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali 1966
Bob Gomel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John Wayne 1969
John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jim Brown 1969
Henry Groskinsky Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Johnny Cash 1969
MIchael Rougier Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jack Nicholson relaxing at home in Los Angeles, 1969.
Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?
That was the direct, provocative question asked in an August 1949 LIFE magazine article that helped cement Jackson Pollock’s reputation. It was a question Pollock spent much of the rest of his life struggling to answer while desperately hoping to show the skeptics why LIFE was right to even ask such a monumental question in the first place.
As the single most recognizable practitioner of Abstract Expressionism—the movement that put America and, specifically, post-World War II New York at the epicenter of painting’s avant-garde—Pollock was a genuine art star. But he soon abandoned the radical “drip” technique that had earned him both fame and, among some art critics, vilification and spent the last few years of his life battling the twin demons of depression and alcoholism.
Here, LIFE presents outtakes from photographer Martha Holmes’ 1949 shoot with Pollock images that offer a unique portrait of the artist’s home life with wife and fellow painter Lee Krasner on eastern Long Island, and the singular working method that made him an art-world icon.
With a down payment loaned to them by art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock and Krasner bought land in the hamlet of Springs, New York, and moved into the house that would be Pollock’s residence for the last decade of his life. Pollock converted a small nearby barn into a studio, where he was to create many of his most famous works. As his fame grew, the little town of Springs — part of East Hampton—attracted other major artists and writers, including Willem de Kooning, Kurt Vonnegut, Nora Ephron, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller.
Despite moving out of the city to live on a farm near the ocean, it’s hard to say that nature was an inspiration for Pollock’s paintings, which were so abstract that their only apparent source was the artist’s subconscious. Still, the natural world did find its way into his paintings in the form of sand and other materials that the artist routinely applied to his canvas, along with his paints, while the titles of some work—like his gargantuan Autumn Rhythm (1950)—reflect a sensibility attuned to the seasons.
Pollock’s work was often referred to as “action painting,” and the dance-like performance in which he engaged while making a painting was integral to the aesthetic result. Instead of using an easel, he’d stretch a canvas on the floor of his barn and scamper around all four sides as he painted. Rather than using brushes, he used sticks to flick and drip paint, or he poured it straight from the can, favoring household enamels over traditional oils.
Today, a painting from Pollock’s “drip period” can fetch north of $100 million at auction.
After he became famous and successful, Pollock bought his own open-air carriage, a 1950 Oldsmobile 88 convertible. This was the vehicle he was driving on August 11, 1956, when, less than a mile from his house, he drove off the road and flipped the car, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger, and injuring his mistress, Ruth Kligman.
Krasner, a talented abstract painter in her own right, had put her career on hold during decade with Pollock in the Long Island house in order to support her husband’s career. After his death, she began painting in the barn that had been his studio. By the time she died in 1984, at age 76, she was finally recognized for her own work, and not merely as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” Today, the farmhouse and barn studio comprise a museum devoted to the study of the married painters’ intertwined working lives.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Long Island, April 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock and neighbor, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At Daniel Miller’s general store in Springs, New York, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock talked with Tino Nivola, a new arrival at the artist colony that began to sprout around the Pollocks’ Long Island village in the late 1940s.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock, Long Island, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock worked in his Long Island studio, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock admired the watercolors of neighbor Mary Monteverdi, a self-taught artist inspired to take up painting after seeing Pollock’s work.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Grocer Daniel Miller (left) visited Pollock and Krasner at their Long Island farmhouse, 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Neighbor Nathaniel Edgar Talmadge (age 84) and his horse Rowdy Kate (age 21) stopped by for a chat with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in April 1949.
Martha Holmes/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jackson Pollock dried dishes with Lee Krasner in the kitchen of their farmhouse, 1949.
Men and women have been rocketing into space from the Earth’s surface for the past half-century—long enough that much of the general public now views space missions as relatively safe, rote endeavors.
But the business of space exploration is not, and has never been, safe. Here, LIFE.com recalls one of the worst disasters in NASA’s history—and its first public tragedy—when astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside their command module on a Cape Canaveral launchpad on Jan. 27, 1967. As TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger (the author of Apollo 13) once wrote, when commemorating the three astronauts:
Test pilots can sense straightaway if they’re working with a good vehicle or a bad one, and the Apollo 1 crew . . . knew almost immediately that they’d been assigned to a stinker. By late 1966, the last of the sturdy, two-man Gemini spacecraft had flown, and NASA was rolling out the three-man Apollo ships that would, at last, carry men to the moon. The spacecraft were sweet-looking machines, but in test-runs on the pad, they were a mess. The electrical system fritzed, the communications died, repairs and upgrades were late in coming. . . . Most worrisome, however, was NASA’s insistence on continuing to use 100% pure oxygen in its atmospheric systems an explosively flammable gas that had worked fine so far in the Mercury and Gemini ships but that could burn like gasoline in the presence of so much as an errant spark . . . Early one Friday evening, when the Apollo 1 astronauts were locked down in the spacecraft for a practice session out on the pad, just such a spark got loose from a frayed wire next to Grissom’s seat. In less than a minute, all three men were dead. For a while, it seemed, the Apollo program would perish too.
The program, of course, survived, and less than three years after the 1967 launchpad fire, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the moon and back—leaving human footprints on the lunar surface—in what some consider the signature triumph of the 20th century.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
American astronauts Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom in the Apollo Mission Simulator, a replica of the capsule in which they died.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Readying for Apollo I tests, Cape Canaveral, Fla., 1966.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Apollo I astronauts (left to right) Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, Fla.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Apollo 1 astronauts (left to right) Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, photographed the week before the fatal fire at Pad 34, from which their mission was to have launched in February 1967.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Apollo 1 astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, 1967.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Apollo 1 astronauts (front to back) Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, Cape Kennedy, Fla.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Roger Chaffee with his wife Martha and their children, Sheryl and Stephen, in their Houston home, 1965.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Astronaut Ed White leapt off a truck before an attentive audience of his fellow astronauts during a training exercise, 1963.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In a husband-and-wife appearance before the press, Pat and Ed White (far left) and Pat and Jim McDivitt shared delight with the news that President Johnson had promoted the astronauts after the flight of Gemini 4 in 1965.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
NASA astronaut Ed White and his wife Pat at home.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
During a family work-out on the horizontal bar, Bonnie Lynn and Eddie White competed against their father, astronaut Ed White.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Astronaut Ed White and family, Houston.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Astronaut Ed White and family, Houston.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Astronaut Gus Grissom in his space suit.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gus Grissom often found relief from the pressures of being an astronaut simply by going fishing. He cast for sea bass near Cape Kennedy.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Astronaut Gus Grissom with his sons.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gus Grissom at home with his son.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gus Grissom with his wife Betty and their sons Scott and Mark.
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In seclusion at a private home high in the Hollywood Hills, the prime crews for the first and second Apollo flights spent two days earlier this winter in an intensive but informal review of flight plans. Grouped around the table were Gus Grissom (far left), Ed White, Roger Chaffee (back showing), Rusty Schweickart (above), Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott (far right).
Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A staff photographer for LIFE for more than 20 years, the late John Dominis photographed . . . well, everything, and he made some of the most memorable pictures to ever grace the pages of LIFE. Among his most famous shots, in a career filled with phenomenal work, is a hair-raising portrait of a leopard and a baboon, seen mere moments before the huge cat kills its terrified prey. It’s an explosive, unsettling and mesmerizing picture. And it was staged.
Or, more accurately, it was not quite the utterly impromptu scene encountered, fortuitously and unexpectedly that one might expect to find in a classic photograph, especially from a photojournalist of Dominis’ rightly celebrated bona fides. Instead, the picture was set up, in accordance with the practices of the time.
Another LIFE great, the photographer John Loengard, interviewed Dominis in October 1993, and quoted him discussing this very picture in the book, Life Photographers: What They Saw (Bulfinch Press, 1998):
I had photographed some animals before [Dominis noted], though I certainly wasn’t a cat expert. Pat Hunt, the head of LIFE’s Nature department, lined up a hunter in Botswana who was a hunter for zoos. He had caught a leopard, and he put the leopard in the back of the truck, and we went out into the desert. He would release the leopard, and most of the time the leopard would chase the baboons and they would run off and climb trees. I had photographed all this. But for some reason one baboon didn’t get off. It turned and faced the leopard, and the leopard killed it. We didn’t know that this was going to happen. I just turned on the camera motor, and I got this terrific shot of this confrontation.
What’s your feeling about injecting yourself into the natural order of things to get pictures?
There was a different feeling about that in the 1960s. We were always setting up pictures of some sort . . . But now there are many, many more competent photographers doing this stuff over long periods of time four or five years if a scientist is on a big study. They’re getting good stuff without helping the picture. But no one was working that way then. Scientists couldn’t handle the crude cameras that we had well enough to get good stuff.
I felt that my job was to get the pictures. I learned how to bait animals and do things from the experts in Africa. We shot a gazelle and put it in a tree and waited for a cat to come. I didn’t feel bad about it at all. It sounds terrible now, I know, and maybe my attitude would be different now. But it wasn’t then, and I don’t know what more to say about it. I know, I’ve been criticized a lot. But to me, I had to do what I did.
Does the fact that this extraordinary image is not, in today’s terms, a purely naturalistic feat of photojournalism somehow detract from its power? Is the leopard’s implacable strength any less formidable, or its lethal grace any less awe-inspiring? Is the photograph itself, technically and aesthetically, any less impressive when we learn that the circumstances under which it was made were even in part manufactured?
We don’t have the answers to these questions. But we feel they’re worth asking. We also take John Dominis’ word for it when he says that he made the picture in good faith, and not with the intention to somehow deceive, or put one over on the viewer. In the end, the harrowing, beautiful photograph he made has earned its longevity.
Albert Schweitzer—the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, theologian, musician and “medical missionary” who spent decades in West Africa—was one of the most recognized figures of the 20th century. To some, he was a well-meaning but ultimately patronizing European bent on enlightening the “Dark Continent” of Africa; to others he was a man whose tireless work with men, women and children suffering from leprosy, malaria, elephantiasis, whooping cough, venereal diseases and countless other vile illnesses elevated him to something close to sainthood.
The reality of Schweitzer’s life and work, meanwhile, was both more complicated and more deeply fascinating than either of those rather simplistic estimations of the man.
In November 1954, LIFE magazine published a feature story on Schweitzer, “A Man of Mercy,” with photographs made by the great W. Eugene Smith. Here, LIFE.com republishes Smith’s photos of Schweitzer, as a reminder of the man’s stature and a celebration of one photographer’s singular vision.
In that issue, LIFE wrote:
“No one knows me,” Albert Schweitzer has sad, “who has not known me in Africa.” In Norway last week, where he had come to acknowledge a Nobel Peace Prize, crowds jammed streets to cheer a great figure of our time. As they cheered they were convinced they knew him well: he is the humanitarian, warm and saintlike. In full manhood he had turned away from brilliant success as a preacher, writer and musician to bury himself as a missionary doctor on Africa.
All this was truth but admirers who have followed Dr. Schweitzer to French Equatorial Africa [specifically, Gabon Ed.] know a different man. There, amid primitive conditions, Europe’s saint is forced to become a remote, driving man who rules his hospital with patriarchal authority. For those seeking the gentle philosopher of the legend, he has a brief answer: “We are too busy fighting pain.” Then he turns back to the suffering and the work that make up the African world of Albert Schweitzer.”
The story behind the most enduring image of the entire photo essay in LIFE, meanwhile, illustrates something quite elemental not about Schweitzer, but (characteristically) about the prickly, occasionally bombastic master photographer who made the picture, W. Eugene Smith. The photograph—the first in this gallery—is beautiful, and telling: here is Dr. Schweitzer, deep inside Africa, overseeing the building of a hospital. It is a portrait that captures so many aspects of the man in one frame: his dedication, the power of his personality, his magnanimity, his “otherness” and at the very same time the rightness of his presence in a land thousands of miles from his birth.
There’s really only one problem with this portrait: it’s not true. Or rather, what truth it contains only survives to this day because Smith drastically manipulated the photograph, combining elements from two separate negatives in order to impart in one picture the narrative he was dead-set on conveying. The silhouetted saw handle and human hand in the lower right of the frame were not part of the larger picture when Smith made it; instead, he combined elements of two distinct images to create a third, now-classic shot of a man quite literally on a mission. (One story says the saw and the hand were added to cover a blurred patch on the larger picture; others who know Smith’s work argue that he simply wished to add a new graphic element and another layer of quiet drama to the whole.)
That this sort of manipulation contravened LIFE’s own photojournalistic guidelines mattered little then—Smith, after all, developed and printed his own work, refusing to allow others to handle his film, his negatives, anything at all—and, in all honesty, it matters even less now. The fact of the matter is, by the time LIFE sent him to Africa to chronicle Schweitzer’s work and his world, Smith was already a legend. He had made some of the most memorable photographs to emerge from World War II (and been wounded while in the Pacific). He had pioneered the photo essay form for LIFE with landmark work like “Country Doctor” (1948) and “Nurse Midwife” (1951). He was prickly, difficult, indefatigable and routinely produced work that most photographers would give their right eye to have made.
The sort of tinkering Smith engaged in with that one, iconic Schweitzer photograph might be frowned upon today. Any contemporary photojournalist who admitted to such behavior would probably be excoriated by his or her peers, as well as by the general public.
W. Eugene Smith, on the other hand, has largely escaped such censure for one reason, and one reason only: he was W. Eugene Smith, and for better or worse, when it comes to aesthetics and even, to some extent, when it comes to ethics genius has always played by, and been judged by, a different set of rules than those that govern the rest of us.
Albert Schweitzer supervised the building of a hospital in Gabon, West Africa, 1954.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A new mother was carried across a hospital village’s street from the delivery room to a ward. Her baby, after being washed and clothed, would be cared for at the mother’s bed.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A big-eyed baby was fed in the hospital nursery. Children whose parents were unable to care for them were kept as long as three years before being turned over to tribal relatives.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The doctor at work examined the post-operative patients on the upper floor of the Schweitzer-designed structure. The lower section, behind the waiting patients, was used for storage and emergency rooms.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Intent on his job, one of Dr. Schweitzer’s workers leaned his weight against a crowbar as men tried to roll a great rock out of the main street of the new village for lepers.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
His umbrella, carried to work in the wet season, was stuck in the sand when Schweitzer went to another job.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
His shoes for muddy rainy season weather were nearly 30 years old.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A portable railroad, lent by a nearby plantation owner, was set down in the main street of the leper village for a major project in earth moving.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Whites and blacks worked together pushing flatcars. The doctor’s ire rose when happy-go-lucky workers used carts as roller coasters.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Lepers in line opened mouths for medicine. One received pills, another water to wash the pills down.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Danish nurse Erna Spohrhannssen watched an African aid give sulphone derivatives for leprosy.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Nurse Spohrhanssen treated sores on leper’s feet.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dying of old age, Eugenia Mwanyeno sat under heavy mosquito netting on a bed in the leper hospital, swaying back and forth with eyes closed, holding tight to last moments of life.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The mourners, daughter of Eugenia, Mama Helene (left), and granddaughter, Henrietta Yeno, were in despair by her bedside. Her granddaughter broke into sobbing chant when the coffin lid was closed; for the rest, mourners guarded grief in silence.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The funeral was attended by Dr. Schweitzer, walking hands clasped behind back, to the graveyard. Though he seldom went to funerals, he made this an exception because Eugenia had long been a familiar figure in the life of the settlement.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A branch of palm leaves to cover the coffin of Eugenia rested on the ground beside the grave-digging tools. Africans often wrap their dead in palm leaves.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A nurse stood at the side of the grave, holding her floral tribute.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frugal habits marked Schweitzer’s life. He opened up used envelopes for manuscript paper and he punctured binding holes in them with old nails.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The fruit of his work hung on nails in Schweitzer’s study, out of reach of any wandering animals. He once lost half a chapter to a hungry antelope.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Albert Schweitzer in Africa, 1954.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Goats on the rooftops clattered about and often butted and wrestled each other for the best positions on the ridges. Schweitzer had imported a basic herd from Europe years earlier, and its playful descendants were allowed to run freely through the village streets and orchard.
Missouri native David Douglas Duncan, a native of Kansas City, is known, primarily, as the signature photographer of the Korean War. In the pages of LIFE magazine and elsewhere, his pictures brought the brutality home to countless Americans who understandably, with memories of the just-finished World War II still fresh in their minds, might have wanted nothing more than to blot out the carnage being inflicted and endured in their name half a world away.
Duncan’s photographs from Korea conveyed a searing, inconvenient truth: namely, that war is still hell, and men, women and children still die horrible deaths, even when the war in question is labeled a “police action.” But Duncan knew war long before he made his harrowing images at Chosin Reservoir and in the rubble-strewn streets of downtown Seoul. He was there, too, in the Second World War, covering battles and suffering shrapnel wounds in the Pacific as a combat photographer with the Marine Corps. He was in Vietnam, a decade and a half after Korea, at Con Thien and Khe San.
The photograph that accompanies this story, made in Korea in 1950, is not only one of the greatest photos made during that “forgotten war,” but is one of the finest war pictures ever made by anyone, in any conflict. In his classic 1951 book, This Is War!, Duncan wrote of the stunned, resolute Marine captain trying to steady himself after an attack by North Korean troops, as ammunition ran dangerously low and reinforcements were nowhere in sight: “Ike Fenton, drenched and with the rain running in little droplets from his bearded chin, got the news. His tattered Baker Company Marines had only those few rounds in their belts remaining. If the Reds were to launch one more attack they would have to be stopped with bayonets and rifle butts.
In its straightforward, unblinking portrayal of the futility, madness, endurance and, at times, the simple nobility one witnesses in the midst of a firefight or a protracted, bloody campaign, Duncan’s picture of Capt. Ike Fenton has rarely been equaled, and never surpassed. Like so many of Duncan’s pictures from Korea, it is indelible.
Talking to Duncan about his Korea pictures, meanwhile, was bracing not merely for the sharpness of the man’s memories so many years later, but for the unexpected and unsolicited declarations of a craftsman congenitally prone to speaking his mind.
“The thing that comes back to me right away, right now, when looking at these pictures again,” Duncan told LIFE.com, “is that at no time did any Marine feel he had to look around to see what the South Koreans were doing behind him [during that war]. The Marines in Korea never feared ‘friendly fire’ or artillery coming from the South Koreans from their allies like they sometimes did later in Vietnam, fighting with the South Vietnamese. The Koreans could be trusted.”
In the years after Korea, Duncan photographed other conflicts all over the globe, but also proved himself a sensitive portraitist and a master of place. He published books on subjects ranging from his great friend, Pablo Picasso, to the Kremlin and the Middle East (The World of Allah, 1983). He published books on the sunflowers of France, Cartier-Bresson and an incredibly moving 100-page work on his beloved German Shepherd, Thor—a creature possessed of what Duncan characterizes as an “Olympian serenity.”
In 2003, he published his monumental and, at the same time, somehow intimate autobiography-in-images, Photo Nomad, featuring pictures and recollections from across seven decades. Every one of his many books is worth seeking out; but for anyone interested in photojournalism in the 20th century, Photo Nomad is indispensable.
Marine Capt. Francis “Ike” Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, Korea, 1950.
![Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.](https://static.life.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated/2014/01/140123-apollo-1-grissom-white-chaffee-17-1024x804.jpg "Home a hero after his successful 1965 mission in Gemini 3, [Gus Grissom] greeted his parents who came from Mitchell, Ind. for the flight.")
