A show celebrating acclaimed photographer Tony Vaccaro at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography (112 Don Gaspar) can be viewed for five more days—through Jan. 29
January 26, 2023 | Source: Monroe Gallery of Photography
January 25, 2023
Honoring Vaccaro
Speaking of countdowns, a show celebrating acclaimed photographer Tony Vaccaro at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography (112 Don Gaspar) can be viewed for five more days—through Jan. 29. Monroe mounted two exhibitions—here and a New York pop-up last month—to honor Vaccaro’s 100th birthday; the photographer died on Dec. 28, just eight days after his centennial, which he celebrated in New York with friends at a surprise birthday dinner.
A New York Times obituary recounts how Vaccaro became a war photographer in World War II—also the subject of a 2016 HBO documentary. After the war, he transitioned and began to make fashion, travel and celebrity photographs for the country’s leading magazines.
Those celebrities included Georgia O’Keeffe, whom Life magazine assigned Vaccaro to photograph in 1960. O’Keeffe expected a more famous photographer and at first refused to pose: “To win her over, Mr. Vaccaro cooked a meal and made a picnic lunch. When the weather turned too windy for the picnic, he gave her a plate of Swiss cheese as she sat in the back of his car. And when she playfully peered through a hole in a piece of the cheese, Mr. Vaccaro went into action,” the obituary reads. His other famous subjects included John F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso and Sophie Loren, to name a few.
This quote from Vaccaro accompanies Monroe’s information on the exhibition: “We call each other German, French, Italian. There is no Italian blood. There is no French blood. It’s human blood. On this Earth there is one humanity. Let’s do something about it. Let’s live! In a way, photography was my way of telling the world, ‘We have better things to do than to kill ourselves.’”