Tony Vaccaro

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tony Vaccaro (born December 20, 1922 in Greensburg , Pennsylvania ) is an American photographer. He is best known for the photos he took in Germany between 1944 and 1949. After the war he was a well-known fashion and lifestyle photographer for various American magazines.

Life

Tony Vaccaro was born on December 20, 1922 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. He was baptized in the Church as Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro . He was the second of three children and the only boy. His parents were Italian immigrants. In 1925 the family moved back to Bonefro in Italy, where his father Giuseppe Antonio Vaccaro (born October 14, 1874) came from. Tony spent his teenage years in Bonefro.

With the outbreak of World War II, Tony Vaccaro returned to the United States. He thus escaped Italian military service. In the US, Vaccaro finished his high school in New Rochelle ( New York ). He was drafted in 1943 and sent to Europe by the US Army in 1944. First he fought as a private in 1944 and 1945 in the 83rd Infantry Division of the US Army in Normandy and then in Germany. His service gave him enough space to take photos. Towards the end of the war, Vaccaro was the official photographer for the division newspaper. In September 1945 he was discharged from the army. However, he stayed in Germany, where he took his first job for the US administration in Frankfurt am Main and worked there for the newspaper supplement Weekend , a supplement to the magazine Stars and Stripes . Vaccaro took photographs in Germany and Europe until 1949, documenting post-war life. 4,000 of his photos were lost in an accident in 1948. He published the war photos in 2001 in his book Entering Germany: Photographs 1944–1949 and in 2002 in the book "Shots of War", edited by Reinhard Schultz.

After returning to the United States, he worked for Life magazine and Look magazine from 1950 before joining Flair magazine .

Awards

In 1994 he was inducted into the French Legion of Honor at the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Publications

  • Entering Germany: Photographs 1944–1949 . Taschen, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-5908-7 .
  • Frank Lloyd Wright. Culture under the umbrella, 2002.
  • Shots of War . Edited by Reinhard Schultz, Galerie Bilderwelt, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-905597-34-9 .
  • Tony Vaccaro. Retrospective. 70 years of photography. Edited by Reinhard Schultz, Galerie Bilderwelt, Berlin 2012.
  • Bataille des Ardennes - Battle of the Bulge. 1944-1945. Luxembourg. Tony Vaccaro. Edited by Reinhard Schultz, Galerie Bilderwelt, Berlin 2014

Movies

  • A life for the moment - the pictures by photographer Tony Vaccaro. Documentary by Daniel and Jürgen Ast, first broadcast on rbb September 2, 2018

Web links

Commons : Tony Vaccaro  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Vaccaro, Tony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vaccaro, Michael A .; Vaccaro, Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio (Christian name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American war and fashion photographer
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Greensburg , Pennsylvania, USA