David Douglas Duncan
Photographer famed for his images of military life who became a friend and chronicler of Picasso
DAVID DOUGLAS DUNCAN, who has died aged 102, was a combat photographer, author and adventurer who chronicled some of the major events and figures of the 20th century.
Although best known for his images of battle-scarred soldiers, Duncan was also a prolific writer on subjects ranging from the Kremlin to the Muslim world and enjoyed a long friendship with Pablo Picasso, whose life he detailed in several books.
A country boy from the American Mid-west, Duncan was described by one critic as “a man with the camera of an artist, the pen of a poet and the genius for the impossible”. In Korea and Vietnam, working for Life magazine, he mastered the intimate portrait of the shell-shocked individual. One of his best known, of a Marine looking out from a foxhole at Con Thien in Vietnam, made the cover of Life in 1967.
In both wars, Duncan focused on the domesticity of front-line life, training his camera on soldiers clinging to some semblance of a routine: eating, shaving, on guard. Meanwhile, his panoramas of battle scenes illustrated the vast scale of events.
Conflict formed only one part of his work, however. He photographed Bedouins in Saudi Arabia, Jewish refugees arriving in Palestine, drivers at the Monaco Grand Prix, sunflowers in France, the Romanov treasures of Russia and American politicians on the campaign trail.
On a trip to Morocco in 1956 to photograph Berbers, Duncan stopped off in Provence on the suggestion of his friend Robert Capa, who put him in touch with Picasso, then living in the small town of Vallauris near Cannes.
Over the following decades, Duncan was given free rein to capture the artist’s home and studio life. Meanwhile, Picasso painted a series of works depicting Duncan’s dachshund, Lump. In Duncan’s The Private World of Pablo Picasso (1958) and Goodbye Picasso (1974) he showed the artist dancing, painting, in action, in contemplation, even in the bath. “He seemed indifferent to a camera,” Duncan observed. “He radiated the innocent purity of children and the command presence of an emperor.” Duncan later lived near Picasso and they remained close until the artist’s death in 1973.
David Douglas Duncan was born on January 23 1916 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Kenneth Stockwell Duncan, an entrepreneur, and his wife Florence. As a boy Duncan loved the outdoors and first became interested in photography when he saw a lantern slide show about big-game hunting.
In 1935 he briefly went to the University of Arizona in Tucson to read Archaeology before transferring to the University of Miami to study Marine Zoology.
A shot taken during a holiday in Mexico of a fisherman casting out a net won a Kodak competition. He bought a new camera with the prize money. His career in photojournalism, meanwhile, had begun in Tucson with a picture of a guest trying to re-enter a burning hotel. The man was John Dillinger, the notorious gangster, who was trying to recover a suitcase containing the proceeds of a bank robbery. It was Duncan’s first scoop.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s Duncan freelanced for various newspapers and took photo-assignments from Pan American Airways and the US government. In 1940 he accompanied the Chile-peru expedition of the American Museum of Natural History and sold his shots of swordfish to National Geographic magazine. They also published his series on giant turtles in the Caribbean.
In 1943 he joined the Marines as a second lieutenant and was given command of a military photographic laboratory at Ewa, near Honolulu. He later photographed the campaign by Fijian guerrillas against Japanese forces on the Solomon Islands and, in 1945, the Japanese surrender on board the battleship Missouri. By the time he left the Marines he had won numerous decorations, including a Purple Heart and a Legion of Merit. In 1946 he returned to America and took a job on the staff at Life.
The magazine sent him to the Middle East where he followed the Qashqai tribesmen on their migration through Iran and photographed the clashes between Jews and Arabs before the foundation of Israel. He went on to cover events in India, Egypt and Bulgaria before, with the outbreak of war, he left for Korea, where he was assigned to the First Division of the US Marines.
His work in Korea made him famous. “Duncan has done for Korea what none of the hundreds of men with cameras achieved in World War II,” wrote Charles Simmons in the New York Times Book Review. He then went to Egypt to cover the aftermath of the coup against King Farouk followed by further African assignments.
While in Afghanistan in 1955, he resigned from Life in order to choose his own stories. His subsequent work included series on Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip for Collier’s and reportage from Russia and Ireland for The Saturday Evening Post.
In Moscow he talked Khrushchev into allowing him to photograph imperial Russia’s crown jewels, a project which took him three years – and five trips – to complete and resulted in the book The Kremlin (1960). He also produced a colour survey of Picasso’s work from the artist’s own collection (Picasso’s Picassos, 1961).
In the mid-1960s, using a Nikon F camera designed to his own specifications, he produced the pictorial essay “Paris in Photographs” for Mccall’s and was paid $50,000 – said to be the highest price for a photo feature at the time.
Duncan’s experiences in Vietnam would lead to the books I Protest! (1968) and War Without Heroes (1970). In the late 1960s he also produced a series of photographs of US political conventions, gatherings of what he called the “best, worst, most mediocre”, including informal shots of Nixon writing speeches.
He was as frank as a writer as he was daring as a photographer. From the mid-1970s he continued to photograph and embark on new book projects but gradually withdrew from magazine work.
His subjects ranged from a Holocaust survivor (The Fragile Miracle of Martin Gray, 1979) to his pet German shepherd (Thor, 1993). His other books include Yankee Nomad: A Photographic Odyssey (1966), The World of Allah (1982), Picasso Paints a Portrait (1996) and Lump: The Dog who ate a Picasso (2006). In 2015 he published a centenary volume, My 20th Century.
Duncan’s first marriage was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Sheila, whom he married in 1962.
David Douglas Duncan, born January 23 1916, died June 7 2018