John Bryson got his journalism start as the editor of a college newspaper in Texas, but became interested in photography as a childhood hobby. He received national attention thanks to an article on college test cheating and was hired by Life magazine from the University of Texas, Austin, initially as a photo researcher in New York and later to be a correspondent, bureau chief for Atlanta, Georgia
in 1947. After serving that role in several major cities he was promoted as a Life photo editor in New York City in 1953. There he was exposed to the work of some of the greatest photojournalists of the time such as Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt. Seeing this great work on a daily basis fired his passion for photography and against all advice he quit Life in 1955 to take a chance as a freelance photographer, moving back to Los Angeles where he had previously been a Life magazine correspondent. The connections with Life paid off and they gave him assignments to cover a range of stories: movie stars, authors, politicians, new military aircraft and everyday American life such as train wrecks, wild fires and industrialists. These stories took him around the world and fulfilled a lifelong dream to emulate another Life journalist & personal hero Ernest Hemingway, who he later photographed. Some of the names he worked with those first few years include Dwight Eisenhower, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Borgnine, Lassie, Maj. He beat out other photographers to land a Life cover of the Little Rock, Arkansas school desegregation in 1957 and got another cover with actor Gene Barry as Bat Masterson in 1959. This work gained him notice and thus he freelanced for other magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Look, Time, Paris Match and London Sunday Times. He was the presidential campaign photographer for John F. Kennedy and also did Robert Kennedy’s campaign on assignment. It wasn’t all glitz and glamour in the early period, for every celebrity or major news story there were several mundane ones such as the Hula-Hoop fad, 24 hours at LAX airport or a Hollywood coffee house--the gamut of typical Life articles, but being based in Los Angeles led to much movie & television work and he photographed most of the great actors & directors of the time: Marilyn Monroe, Robert Mitchum, Katharine Hepburn, Ingmar Bergman and John Ford along with producers like Dino de Laurentiis. He was a favorite of Frank Sinatra and worked with him in recording studios, Las Vegas nightclubs and on the road in his private jet or relaxing in his Palm Springs house. An assignment to shoot the John Frankenheimer movie Grand Prix in 1966 got him a small role as a photographer and a lifelong friendship with the director, who lived a few houses down on Malibu’s Carbon Beach. Other close friends in the movie business were Robert Mitchum, Sam Peckinpah, Eli Wallach, Jason Robards, Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Peckinpah gave him a speaking role in The Getaway as the #2 bad guy, he photographed the film, and many of these friends used to gather in writer Tom Runyon’s offbeat restaurant The Old Place in the Malibu mountains for riotous parties. His career began to wind down in the late 1980’s and he authored several books, his last being an intimate portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in her retirement, The Private World of Katharine Hepburn, which he wrote & photographed. After a long association with Sygma and a close friendship with Elianne Laffont he consolidated all his working archive with her agency after initially being with most of the majors, though Time Life continued to carry his work for them. Right before Sygma was acquired by Corbis she helped bring him back from a near-fatal illness after he came out of a stormy relationship with his last wife, and he had another half decade of contented retirement.
© 2013 Bryson Photo
