David Douglas Duncan, 102, Who Photographed the Reality of War, Dies

His marriage to Leila Khanki, in 1947, ended in divorce. He married Sheila Macauley in 1962. She is his only immediate survivor.

Mr. Duncan covered the Republican and Democratic National Conventions for NBC News in 1968. He was just back from Vietnam, and what might have been a hiatus from combat turned violent in Chicago, where National Guardsmen with rifles and police officers with nightsticks and tear gas clashed with antiwar demonstrators outside the convention hall where Democrats were meeting. His photographs showed helmeted troops on Michigan Avenue, protesters with gashed and bleeding heads, and a sobbing girl who pleaded with him, “Please, tell it like it was.” The grim scenes were published in his 1969 book, “Self-Portrait: U.S.A.”

Mr. Duncan’s archives — including thousands of combat photographs, works on Picasso and others for “The Kremlin” (1960), “Sunflowers for Van Gogh” (1986) and other books — were acquired in 1996 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

He went to war with only essential equipment: helmet, poncho, spoon, toothbrush, compass, soap and backpack containing two canteens, an exposure meter, film and two cameras. He used a Rolleiflex in World War II, but preferred a 35-millimeter. He took two Leica IIIc cameras into Korea, and said they stood up well in the rain and mud. He often used 50-millimeter f/2 and 135-millimeter f/3.5 Nikkor lenses.

A 1972 exhibit of his war photos at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was hailed in The New York Times. “Again and again,” the photography columnist Gene Thornton said of Mr. Duncan, “he approaches and crosses the line that divides the journalist’s interest in the here and now from the artist’s concern with the timeless and universal.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/obituaries/david-douglas-duncan-102-who-photographed-the-reality-of-war-dies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss