Fred Iltis

Fred Iltis (Brno, Czechoslovakia, April 20, 1923 – San Jose, California, December 11, 2008) is an American entomologist.

In 1939, when the Nazis threatened to invade his country, Fred (Wilfred Gregor) fled with his family to Fredericksburg, Virginia. During World War II he served in the Army in the South Pacific. He did his undergraduate work at George Washington University and Western Kentucky State Teachers College. Fred went on to earn his Ph.D. in entomology at University of California, Davis.

In 1948 he married Julia Patricia Zrinyi (1926-2004), a graphic artist, who preceded him in death in 2004. He worked briefly at Harvard in 1967-1968 as a research fellow in Tropical Public Health for the Harvard School of Public Health. After settling in San Jose, California in the 60s, Fred taught in the biology department at San José State University.

His research focus was on the biosystematics and the life cycle of mosquitoes. Fred Iltis was also an exceptional photographer. Many photos of his vast archive are about the Civil rights movement in the 60s, the student protest against the Vietnam War, the struggle of the chicano agricultural workers led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the strikes and boycott of the American fruit companies. He met and befriended the renowned photojournalists Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, who had illustrated on Life (magazine) the Great Depression of the 30s. They talked Fred into the fact that “a photo can express one’s ideas and ideals far better than a thousand words”.

In his journeys south of the border (where he met the Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo), he portrayed the life of the Mexican Indians, particularly in Michoacán. Fred developed and printed his photos using the slow and complicated archival process system, by which the prints can last for many decades.

His father was the biologist Hugo Iltis and his brother is the botanist Hugh Iltis.