Photo Stories

//the story behind the picture

The first take off of the Space Shuttle, Cape Canaveral, Florida 1980


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The first take off of the Space Shuttle, Cape Canaveral, Florida 1980
I was assigned by Paris Match Magazine to shoot the launch.  I took a friend, Peter Lemos, as an assistant.  We arrived to a media frenzy.  The center piece on the media hill-side was HIRO et al. He was seated in deck chairs, white with black type on the back band.  He had two assistants with big white umbrellas standing behind him and I believe his wife.  He was shooting for Vogue.  He had his section roped off.

  Minutes before launch off, the blast off was postponed for technical reasons.  We retired to a sleazy motel for the weekend, where I managed to drink beer, and fall asleep in the blazing sun pool-side-I blamed my assistant for this.  Yikes was I pink!  I read the entire “Right Stuff” that weekend.  

  I mentioned to my father how exciting the book was and the characters.  For the first time in his life, he informed me that he was in the Nevada bar when they drew straws to be the first pilot to break the sound bearer on the  X-1.  The rest is history, Yeager won the draw. That was a revelation to me. But the vivid depiction of the gestalt of  the astronauts life –tooling around the Florida coast in convertibles-was vividly portrayed as only Tom Wolfe can do.

  Then there was the take-off.  Anti-climatic after that weekend.

  Kim Steele, Photographer

Budapest, October 29, 1989

Budapest_flag

October 29, 1989

Thirty-three years to the day after riding through Budapest's crowded and exuberant streets on my father's shoulders, watching the explosive revolutionary mayhem of red stars yanked off buildings and statues of Stalin defaced from the perspective of an awestruck three-year-old, I was back in Budapest at the behest of a capitalist magazine to photograph the spirit of Hungary.  And suddenly here was another revolution to behold, a quieter one without tanks, Molotov cocktails, or soldiers, and as I took my place among the half million in front of Parliament, I saw a new Republic declared from its windows not with desperate violence, but with poetry, music, lofty ideals and enlightened camaraderie.  Some part of me felt that for the intervening thirty-three years I had been in exile.

Photographer:  Peter Vidor

 

Christmas in Antarctica, 1966

Mcmurdo

Christmas 1966 - McMurdo Sound, Antarctica - 0400

Four weary sailors from the U.S.S. Atka help each other back across the ice to the ship after a long evening of Christmas Eve beer drinking at the "Playboy Club" at the U.S. scientific research base at McMurdo.  I was following somewhat unsteadily in their wake but somehow managed to focus my trusty Kaliflex.  I served my Navy Reserve active duty on the now long-decomissioned icebreaker, spending six months in Antarctica and another six months in the Arctic, spying on the Russians in the Barents Sea.  Isolated duty but considering that there was a shooting war going on in Viet Nam at the time, not a bad place to be.  

Photographer:  Jerry Bowles
Camera:  Kaliflex 120, purchased used for $25 in 1965