Today December 20thth and Tony Vaccaroit’s birthday. 100! The Monroe Photography Gallery celebrates this milestone with two exhibitions, a pop-up in NYC that closed this weekend and a second exhibition at their gallery in Santa Fe that is on view through January 15, 2023.
Vaccaro is known for his World War II photographs, the subject of a 2016 HBO documentary, and his editorial work for Life, Look, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and countless other publications. Exhibitions coincide with Tony Vaccaro 100! on display at the Museum of Photography in Braunschweig, Germany. In both locations Tony Vaccaro: The Centenary Exhibition, juxtaposes the living legend’s powerful wartime imagery with the lyrical mid-century fashion, film, and pop culture photography that came later.
On display are more than two dozen photographs dating from 1944-1979. From the battlefields of Europe to the rooftops of Manhattan, Vaccaro trained his inimitable target with a sensitivity derived from early hardships as an orphan in Italy. After the war, he replaced the searing images of horror etched in his memory, focusing on the brilliance of life and capturing the beauty of fashion and of those who gave of themselves: artists, writers, movie stars and cultural figures . From a photograph of a soldier running in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge to a shot of actress Gwen Verdon swinging in a hammock against the New York skyline, the exhibition illustrates Vaccaro’s will to live against all odds and to promote the power of beauty. Several never-before-exhibited photographs will be on display: a 1951 image of a bevy of beautiful women surrounding one in a pink dress on a balcony, a 1968 shot of Vaccaro holding a test strip during a photo shoot, and a sunset brilliant portrait of the 1979 World Trade Center Twin Towers.
While Vaccaro approaches his 100th birthday on 20 December 2022, he survived two bouts of Covid and is one of the few people alive who can claim to have survived the battle of Normandy and Covid. He attributes his longevity to “blind luck, red wine and determination.”
“For me, the greatest thing you can do is challenge the world,” Vaccaro said. “And most of these challenges I win. This is what keeps me going.
About Tony Vaccaro
Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania on December 20, 1922, Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro spent the early years of his life in the village of Bonefro, Italy after his family left America under threat from the Mafia. Both of his parents had died when he was eight, and he was raised by an indifferent aunt and brutal uncle. His love for photography was born in Bonefro where at the age of ten he started taking pictures with a box camera. When World War II broke out, the American ambassador in Rome ordered Vaccaro to return to the States. He settled with his sisters in New Rochelle, NY, where he joined his high school bedroom club. His teacher and mentor Bertram Lewis guided him through a year of intense apprenticeship.
A year later, at the age of 21, Vaccaro was drafted into the war. He was determined to photograph war and had his Argus C-3 portable 35mm camera with him from the start. In the spring of 1944 he was photographing war games in Wales. In June, now a combat infantryman in the 83rd Infantry Division, he was on a boat bound for Omaha Beach, six days after the first Normandy landings. For the next 272 days, Vaccaro fought and photographed on the front lines of war. He entered Germany in December 1944, as a private in the intelligence platoon, and was tasked with going behind enemy lines at night. In the post-war years he remained in Germany to photograph the country’s reconstruction Stars and Stripes magazine.
Returning to the United States in 1950, Vacarro began his career as a commercial photographer, eventually working for virtually every major publication: Flair, Life, Look, Harper’s Bazaar, Quick, Newsweek, Town and Country, Venture, and many others. Tony became one of the most sought-after photographers of his day, photographing everyone from Enzo Ferrari and Sophia Loren to Pablo Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim and Frank Lloyd Wright. From 1970 to 1980 he taught photography at Cooper Union.
“Il Maestro”, as the Italian press calls him, has won numerous awards and prizes. These include the Art Director’s Gold Medal (New York City, 1963), The World Press Photo Gold Medal (The Hague, 1969), The Legion of Honor (Paris, 1994), The Medal of Honor (Luxembourg, 2002), Das Verdienstkreuz (Berlin, 2004) and the Minerva d’Oro (Pescara, 2014).
Since his retirement in 1982, Vaccaro’s work has been exhibited worldwide over 250 times and has been published or the subject of ten books and two major films. In 2014, the Tony Vaccaro Photo Museum was inaugurated in Bonefro, Italy.
Vaccaro’s works are found in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
In 2016, HBO Films premiered At Gunpoint: The Untold Story of Private First Class Tony Vaccaro. The film tells the story of how he survived the war, fighting the enemy and also documenting his experience of him at great risk, developing his photos in combat helmets at night and hanging the negatives from tree branches. The film also encompasses a broad range of contemporary issues surrounding combat photography, such as the ethical challenges of witnessing and recording conflict, the ways in which combat photography helps define how wars are perceived by the public, and the sheer difficulty staying alive while taking photos in a war zone. The film led to a renaissance of Vaccaro’s career.
In 2018, Vaccaro’s photographs were featured in major solo exhibitions in Venice, Italy; Potsdam, Germany; London, England; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2019 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in St. Louis, Mo. In 2021 the Kunsthalle Helsinki presented the exhibition Tony Vaccaro: It’s a Wonderful Life, a selection of 130 images from his nearly 80-year career.
Tony Vaccaro: The centenary exhibition
Until 15 January 2023
Monroe Photography Gallery
112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, New Mexico
http://www.monroegallery.com
