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David Gahr RIP (Read 431 times)
TenThousandMotels
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David Gahr RIP
May 29th, 2008 at 8:19am
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David Gahr, Photographer of Musicians, Dies at 85

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: May 29, 2008
NYT

David Gahr, who turned his back on a promising career as a scholar to take pictures and listen to music and who as a result landed among the pre-eminent photographers of American folk, blues, jazz and rock musicians of the 1960s and beyond, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 85.

His daughter, Carla, announced his death.

Mr. Gahr’s prodigious output included posed photos and reportorial documents. Popular among his subjects for what they saw as a desire to elevate rather than merely capture them, he had a four-decade relationship with Bob Dylan, famously depicting him, gangly and youthful, at the Newport Folk Festivals of the early 1960s and taking studio photographs for the 2001 album “Love and Theft.” His portrait of Janis Joplin in full-throated performance appeared in 1988, two decades after it was taken, on the cover of Time magazine’s 20-year retrospective on 1968 as the year that shaped a generation.

He captured an athletic and fiercely arch-backed Miles Davis, trumpet to his lips, for the cover of the 1970 album “A Tribute to Jack Johnson” and a pensive Bruce Springsteen for the cover of the 1973 album “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.” He shot dozens of album covers for Folkways Records.

Mr. Gahr’s book-length collaboration with the writer Robert Shelton, “The Face of Folk Music” (Citadel Press, 1968), is an exhaustive chronicle of the rise of “the folk movement” of the 1960s, as Mr. Shelton called it, containing hundreds of black-and-white photographs of musicians on and off stage, including Mr. Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Johnny Cash and Sonny Terry. The book remains a testament to a world that Mr. Gahr not only documented but lived in.

“I remember once when I was a girl Janis Joplin wanted a lift back from Newport,” Ms. Gahr said in a telephone interview this week. “But my mom thought she wouldn’t be a good influence.”

David Gahr was born in Sept. 18, 1922, in Milwaukee, where, he said in published interviews, he grew up in a largely black neighborhood and was first exposed to blues and jazz. His parents, Max and Yetta, were immigrants from Russia; his father was a street peddler. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He served in the infantry in Europe in World War II and on his return became a doctoral candidate at Columbia. He was married, and to maintain his family he worked at a Sam Goody record store, where he photographed the famous musicians who came in as customers. He was invited to join the staff of The New Republic magazine in Washington, writing on economic issues, but stayed put and opted for the simpler economics of survival.

“I became a professional photographer on the morning my son, Seth, was born,” he told the magazine F.Y.I., the in-house publication of Time-Life, where he completed more than 2,000 assignments.

His wife, Ruth, died in 1993. In addition to his daughter, of Manhattan, and his son, of Stratham, N.H., he is survived by a brother, Samuel, of Milwaukee, and two grandchildren.

Mr. Gahr’s portfolio was not restricted to music. He spent much of a decade from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s on assignments for Time magazine, many on art-related subjects with the writer Robert Hughes. He also worked for Life and later People. He photographed Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning and Georgia O’Keeffe. He took book-jacket photos of John Cheever and Arthur Miller.

Asked why her father gave up the intellectual life so abruptly, Ms. Gahr said: “He didn’t want to move to Washington, D.C. And I think he found the whole idea a little boring. I remember him answering that question once. He said, ‘Economics? Yuk.’ He loved music.”


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David Gahr
David Gahr photographed Bob Dylan’s first concert appearance with an electric guitar in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival.

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David Gahr
Mr. Gahr captured a moment with John Lennon in Manhattan in 1974.

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