Photographer John Dominis died Monday at age 92 and left behind one of those archives that are hard to comprehend. Over the course of a few decades at Life magazine, Dominis not only worked in just about every photographic genre but also seemed to have mastered them.
The underpinning to his wildly variegated archive (fashion, war, architecture, poverty) is a sensibility: a way of reconciling the gravity of life with its levity in a single frame; an intuitive understanding of light and shadow; an enviable way of adapting to any situation.
Here is a very limited look at those moments, both iconic and quotidian, that Dominis witnessed and preserved:
Sports (But Lyrically)
Animals (As A Taxonomist Might See Them)
Things Organized Neatly (Before It Was Cool)
Portraits (In Really Creative Ways)
Food (Modernist Cuisine, Anyone?)
War
Technology And Innovation (And Interesting Light)
Politics (From Eisenhower To Nixon)
Wildlife (As In, Life And Death)
Celebrities (And Good Times)
Not Celebrities (And Hard Times)
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