John Morris — picture editor linked to indelible 20th century war images
John Morris, a renowned picture editor who left an indelible stamp on photojournalism from World War II through the Vietnam War, died Friday at a hospital near his home in Paris. He was 100.
His friend and colleague Robert Pledge, a founder of the agency Contact Press Images, confirmed the death.
Mr. Morris had a long and storied career in picture editing. In one memorable instance, in wartime London, he edited Robert Capa’s historic pictures of the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 and got them printed and shipped to New York in time for the next week’s issue of Life, the country’s largestcirculation picture magazine at the time.
Forceful and sometimes fractious, Mr. Morris had a peripatetic career that included stops at most of the major postwar centers of American photojournalism. In addition to Life, he worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic and the celebrated cooperative agency Magnum Photos.
Though a lifelong Quaker and pacifist — he made an exception for World War II, calling it just — Mr. Morris was closely associated with images of war, which he was instrumental in placing before the eyes of the world.
At Magnum he offered assignments to the great war photographer and photo essayist W. Eugene Smith after Smith had a falling-out with Life.
While working for the Times during the Vietnam War, he successfully argued for front-page display of Eddie Adams’ photograph of a Saigon police chief shooting a suspected Viet Cong insurgent in the head. It appeared as the lead picture on Feb. 2, 1968, and became one of the most indelible images to emerge from the war.
So did a photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm bombing raid. (The photograph was credited to Nick Ut, whose given name was later revealed to be Huynh Cong Ut.) Mr. Morris persuaded editors to run that photo at the bottom of the front page despite a Times policy against nudity. Both that photograph and the one by Adams won Pulitzer Prizes.
Mr. Morris was himself an eyewitness to history: In the early morning of June 5, 1968, he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. “The most terrible event I think I ever witnessed up close,’’ he said in an interview.
It turned him — for a day, at least — into a reporter (he seldom carried a camera himself ): His eyewitness account appeared on the front page of the next day’s Times, under his byline.
“For five minutes, the throng in the Embassy Room was thrown into a state of panic,” Mr. Morris reported. “The cries of admiration changed to hysterical screams as the shots — muffled by the crowd noise — penetrated the consciousness of the bystanders.”
John Godfrey Morris was born in Maple Shade, N.J., on Dec. 7, 1916, and grew up in Chicago. He became passionate about journalism as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, going to work for the campus newspaper and founding a student magazine called Pulse, loosely modeled on Life.
After graduation he came to New York and, in 1938, found a job at Life as a clerk. He worked his way up to Hollywood correspondent and, with the outbreak of World War II, London picture editor, in charge of Life’s photographic coverage of the war in Europe.
His editing of Capa’s photos of D-Day produced one of the more enduring bits of lore in photojournalism history. As the story went, Capa sent the London office four rolls of film from Normandy, but in the rush to process them a darkroom technician overheated the film during drying, ruining all but 11 frames.
Or so the technician had told him, Mr. Morris said, and he related that account for 70 years or so.
But recently, persuaded by newer theories that have since emerged, he came to believe that a darkroom error was not the reason there were so few Capa frames. He told Jim Estrin of the Times in December 2016 that he believed that Capa had been so rattled during the withering fire at Omaha Beach that he exposed only 11.
Mr. Morris went to Normandy within weeks of the invasion to see the Western Front for himself and better understand the photos he had been editing in London. Allowed to walk ashore at Normandy in July 1944, he spent a month in the combat zone accompanying photographers, including Capa, for Life and the Associated Press. In Normandy, he and Capa narrowly avoided being wounded when they came under fire from a German platoon.
Mr. Morris left Life’s London bureau at the end of the war and, after a brief stint heading the magazine’s Paris bureau, returned to New York and became the picture editor of Ladies’ Home Journal.
It was an unlikely home for the kind of photojournalism he had championed, but in 1948 he persuaded the magazine’s editors to print photographs of Russia that Capa had taken on a trip with John Steinbeck, and he later introduced a series of picture essays called “People Are People the World Over.”
By Mr. Morris’ account, the series partly inspired Edward Steichen to curate “The Family of Man,” an exhibition of more than 500 pictures by more than 270 photographers that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955.
His association with Capa led Mr. Morris to leave Ladies’ Home Journal to become the first executive editor of Magnum, which had been founded by Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger in 1947.
Hired in 1953, Mr. Morris was put in charge of selling Magnum’s pictures to magazines, running its offices in New York and Paris, and managing its mercurial and far-flung photographers. By the end of his first year, he was already arguing with Capa about the agency’s future size and direction, but he remained Magnum’s main manager and salesman for nine years.
He joined the Washington Post in 1964 with the title of assistant managing editor, responsible for, among other things, choosing color photographs for the front page. The Post was one of the first large newspapers to run color photos.
But he was fired after less than a year, having run afoul of a deputy managing editor, and returned to New York, where he joined the Times. He was picture editor there from 1967 to 1973, during the height of the Vietnam War.
After stepping down as picture editor, he was named head of NYT Pictures, a syndication service started by the Times primarily to market the work of its staff photographers. He left that job in 1975.
Mr. Morris returned to Paris in 1983, soon after marrying Tana Hoban, a photographer who specialized in children’s books, and spent the next six years as Paris editor of National Geographic. He was a frequent visitor to the United States to judge photojournalism competitions and to lecture at journalism schools.
Mr. Morris had been widowed twice when he married Hoban, and she, too, died before him, in 2006. His first wife, the former Mary Adele Crosby, with whom he had four children, died in 1964. His second wife, the former Marjorie Smith, a school headmistress and single mother of two sons with whom he had two daughters, died in 1981.
Among his honors was the Légion d’Honneur, presented in 2009, and an Infinity Award for lifetime achievement given by the International Center of Photography in New York in 2010.
He is survived by his partner, Patricia Trocmé; four sons from two marriages, John II, Chris, Kirk and Oliver; and four grandchildren.