PHOTOGRAPHER OF CELEBRITY AND POLITICAL LIFE AFTER THE WAR

Henri Dauman, a Holocaust survivor and French emigre who as a magazine photographer depicted the ascent of postwar political and celebrity culture with his pictures of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral, Elvis Presley entering and leaving the U.S. Army and Elizabeth Taylor reacting viscerally to a heavyweight title match, died Sept. 13 at his home in Hampton Bays, New York. He was 90.

As a freelance photographer, Dauman was a oneman agency who made his mark in the late 1950s and early ’60s with pictures that had a cinematic look, a quality he attributed to his love of the movies, especially the shadowy world of film noir that he explored as a teenage orphan in postwar Paris.

In 1958, he depicted designer Yves Saint Laurent in the swirl of Times Square in New York, looking both a part of it and apart from it. The next year he photographed Marilyn Monroe and playwright Arthur Miller, her husband at the time, during the premiere of the movie “Some Like It Hot.”

In 1960, Dauman photographed the Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johansson heavyweight title fight at the

Polo Grounds in New York’s Manhattan borough. In “Looking Up,” he recalled taking a few shots of the bout (which Patterson won) but noticed a Hollywood star ringside who was more intriguing: Taylor, in a sleeveless, low-cut dress, shouting, cringing and cheering.

Dauman followed Kennedy from his campaign for the presidency in 1960 to his inauguration and eventually to his funeral on Nov. 25, 1963. There he captured Jacqueline Kennedy, her face behind a black veil, as she walked in the funeral procession flanked by her husband’s brothers Robert and Edward. His pictures were splashed over five pages of Life magazine.

In addition to Life, Dauman’s work appeared from the 1950s through the ’70s in The New York Times Magazine and in Newsweek, Smithsonian, New York, Epoca, Der Stern and Paris Match magazines. His work captured civil rights protests, street scenes in New York City and a Bronx gang called the Savage Nomads.

Henri David Dauman was born April 5, 1933, in Paris. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland.

In May 1941, almost a year after France fell to Germany, his father was summoned and arrested by the Vichy regime and later died in the Auschwitz death camp. In July 1942, when French police tried to break into their apartment, Dauman and his mother slipped away to his Aunt Anna’s apartment. They later fled to Paris’ western suburbs. In Limay, Dauman was placed in the home of a family acquaintance while his mother found shelter nearby in Mantes-laJolie.

Limay and Mantes-laJolie became frequent targets of German aerial strafing attacks. He and his mother soon fled to a farmhouse in Normandy, France.

After Paris was liberated in 1944, they returned to their apartment, but their time together was brief. His mother died in 1946 after swallowing bicarbonate that had been tainted with poison, one of eight victims of an unscrupulous pharmacist. When his relatives refused to take him in, Dauman went to live in the first of two orphanages that became home. As a teenage orphan, he had the freedom to work as an apprentice studio photographer, then an assistant fashion photographer and entertainment photographer for Radio Luxembourg and an agency.