Henri Dauman, a Holocaust survivor and French émigré who as a magazine photographer depicted the ascent of postwar political and celebrity culture with his pictures of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral, Elvis Presley entering and leaving the U.S. Army and Elizabeth Taylor reacting viscerally to a heavyweight title match, died on Sept. 13 at his home in Hampton Bays, N.Y. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his granddaughter Nicole Jones.
As a freelance photographer, Mr. Dauman was a one-man agency who made his mark in the late 1950s and early ’60s with pictures that had a cinematic look, a quality he attributed to his love of the movies, especially the shadowy world of film noir that he explored as a teenage orphan in postwar Paris.
In 1958, he depicted the designer Yves Saint Laurent in the swirl of Times Square, looking both a part of it and apart from it. The next year he photographed Marilyn Monroe and the playwright Arthur Miller, her husband at the time, during the premiere of the movie “Some Like It Hot.” She looks lovingly at him, but Mr. Dauman said he did not see Miller returning her love.
“I always looked to show the personality of the subjects as they are, not the personality that they project to the public,” he said in “Henri Dauman: Looking Up” (2018), a documentary directed by Peter Kenneth Jones, who is married to Ms. Jones, one of the film’s producers.
In 1960, Mr. Dauman photographed the Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johansson heavyweight title fight at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. In “Looking Up,” he recalled taking a few shots of the bout (which Patterson won) but noticed a Hollywood star ringside who was more intriguing: Ms. Taylor, in a sleeveless, low-cut dress, shouting, cringing and cheering.
“That sequence made the story,” he said.
Mr. Dauman followed John F. Kennedy from his campaign for the presidency in 1960 to his inauguration and eventually to his funeral on Nov. 25, 1963. There he captured Jacqueline Kennedy,…
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