At sunup he moved to the backyard to photograph the volcanic explosion. “New Dawn,” one of Mr. Turner’s phantasmagorical pictures, portrays lava in shades of yellow, orange and red, spraying in a fluid arc as if an unseen hand were directing it leftward over the volcano. By underexposing his shots, he made the colors become more saturated.
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“It was like being in the center of a science fiction movie,” he said on his website.
Donald Peter Turner was born in Albany on May 30, 1934. His father, Donald, was the leader of a 23-piece touring band that was based for a while in Montreal. His mother, the former Ruth Murray, was a homemaker. Fascinated by photography from a young age, he was developing color pictures by age 14.
“I love black and white photography, but somehow I got seduced by color,” he told Photo District News in 2000. “I remember going to the art supply store as a kid and looking at watercolor paint boxes and thinking, ‘These are beautiful.’ ”
After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where Mr. Uelsmann was among his classmates, Mr. Turner was drafted into the Army. He served primarily at a combat photographic center in Astoria, Queens, where he ran the photo lab and experimented with a new type of color printing. He was occasionally sent by the Army on assignments, like photographing rockets in Florida; he also found subjects to photograph in Manhattan on weekends.
After his discharge, he joined the Freelance Photographers Guild and went on a monthslong assignment for the Airstream trailer company, following a caravan of 43 vehicles traveling from South Africa to Egypt. The sojourn whetted his appetite for more work in Africa and gave him a vivid portfolio that helped him secure assignments from Esquire, Look, Sports Illustrated and Holiday magazines, as well as from advertisers and Hollywood films — he was on set for “Cleopatra” (1963) and “The Night of the Iguana” (1964).
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/arts/pete-turner-dead-color-photographer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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