John Morris: an eyewitness to history

When John Morris presented his press card for a Sarkozy-Obama event at the Élysée Palace, French officials were stunned. The card for "Correspondent 114" was not only dated 1944 (Morris used it after D-Day), but it was issued in London from the office of Charles de Gaulle, father of modern France, leader of the Resistance.

Morris got into the press conference.

He is a man who's kept a warm seat on history's front row. As a lifelong photo editor, Morris has worked with some famous photographers: Robert Capa was a close friend. So was W. Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson. For Morris they weren't "famous", but colleagues.

Morris was London photo editor for Life magazine in 1943, and was present at the creation of the upstart photography agency Magnum, and helped conceive the Family of Man exhibit in 1954. He has spent a life pioneering high-quality images in a news medium that, when he started, treated photos as filler.

Now 93, Morris has scarcely slowed down. A Paris expat, he gives talks on "my 17 presidents" from his Bastille apartment; was recently awarded France's Légion d'Honneur; writes on peace and disarmament; and is working on a new book, A Love Letter to My Three Wives.

"He's 93 — going on 45," says Charles Rivkin, the United States ambassador to France.

Endless parade

Morris remembers in detail an endless parade of figures: from Marlene Dietrich, to George Patton, to Ernest Hemingway, Andrei Sakharov and Walter Cronkite. He was photo editor at The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The rise of the image in global culture is "a blessing and a curse ... but history needs it", Morris says. Life magazine was revolutionary in its use of photos that drove stories. But the concept started with European magazines busting the mould of pure print, he says — first in Berlin, then London, and then in the US — by Hungarian and German refugees working for agencies such as Pix and Black Star. They used small cameras that shot frames quickly. It was the start of photojournalism.

Morris champions an earned intimacy — images shot over time. "At Life we recorded people's lives in humane ways. We certainly got the joy and tragedy. But we didn't invade people's privacy — I hate the paparazzi style."

Great photographers blend three elements: "They have an eye, a heart, and a brain," he says. News photos should "combine aesthetics and history". But today's editors overplay aesthetics and often ignore "an awareness of a news narrative ... a good picture that has historical meaning."

This past June, the 65th anniversary of D-Day, Morris recalled handling the pool images of the US landings at Normandy. On June 6, 1944, the wait was unbearable: Nothing came back from Utah beach; the film fell into the English Channel. Finally, four rolls arrived from Capa at Omaha, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting. There were only minutes to get negatives to censors, who flew it to Washington.

A staffer rushed Capa's film and dried it too quickly, melting the emulsion — a disaster. But on the last roll Morris found 11 faint images. They became the world's visual record of the Omaha landings.

A main Morris claim to fame is the 1955 Family of Man exhibit, chronicling the daily life of people worldwide. Curated by Edward Steichen of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with text by Carl Sandburg, it honoured the United Nations human rights charter and an end to "the scourge of war". The exhibit toured 37 countries and was "most appreciated in Japan and Germany", Morris says.

Morris is "a man of six cities" — New York, London, Washington, Chicago, Paris, and Los Angeles. (He worked in the latter as Hollywood correspondent for Life.)

But Paris comes first. Morris isn't a disillusioned expat, though he did lead a march of "Americans for Peace" during the first Iraq war. ("If I had come to Paris in protest it would have been over Vietnam. ... I've never apologised for being a liberal ... I've not supported any US war since the Second World War," where he participated under conscientious-objector status.)

Rather, "I still think Paris is the most beautiful city in the world." In 1944, during its liberation, he wrote a love letter to his wife, and to Paris. But he didn't move there until 1983, for National Geographic. Morris agrees with expat Irwin Shaw, who said: "I was never a Parisian. I was always an American, on an extended visit ..."

Morris was raised in Chicago and worked on the University of Chicago paper. On a ship back from Europe in 1935 he nearly got talked out of journalism by a friend of FDR's. "He was wearing a tuxedo, I was in knickers. He advised I get a public-policy degree." But Morris had an epiphany his first day back at the school paper: "I sat down at a typewriter, and just knew, ‘This is it. This is my career'."