Dennis Stock

Life and career

Stock was born in New York City, to Fannie and Fred Stock. His father was Swiss and his mother was English.

Stock served in the United States Army from 1947 to 1951. Following his discharge, he apprenticed under photographer Gjon Mili. In 1951, he won a first prize in a Life magazine competition for young photographers. That same year, he became an associate member of the photography agency Magnum. He became a full partner-member in 1954.

Stock met the actor James Dean in 1955, a few months before the latter's sudden death. He undertook a series of photos of the actor in Hollywood, Dean's hometown in Indiana, and in New York City. One of his portraits of Dean in New York's Times Square became an iconic image of the young star. The black and white picture shows the actor with a pulled up collar on a casual jacket and a cigarette in his mouth on a rain-soaked, grey day. It later appeared in numerous galleries and on postcards and posters and became one of the most reproduced photographs of the post-war period.

From 1957 until the early 1960s, Stock aimed his lens at jazz musicians, photographing such people as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Gene Krupa and Duke Ellington or Miles Davis ( see for example, Milestones Cover Photo). With this series of photographs he published the book Jazz Street. In 1962, he received the first prize at the International Photo Competition in Poland. In 1968, Stock left Magnum to start his own film company, Visual Objectives Inc., and made several documentaries, but he returned to the agency a year later, as vice president for new media and film. In the mid-1970s, he traveled to Japan and the Far East, and also produced numerous features series, such as photographs of contrasting regions, like Hawaii and Alaska. In the 1970s and 1980s he focused on color photography of nature and landscape, and returned to his urban roots in the 1990s focusing on architecture and modernism.

In 2006 Stock married writer Susan Richards. They lived in Woodstock, New York with their four dogs.

Film portrayals

In 2011, a documentary film Beyond Iconic: Photographer Dennis Stock, narrated by Stock himself was released. It was completed before his death.

Robert Pattinson portrayed him in the biographical drama film Life (2015), about Stock's friendship with James Dean.

Death

Dennis Stock died of colon and liver cancer in Sarasota, Florida.

Awards

Publications