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Dennis Stock, a photographer whose intimate and evocative portraits captured the essence of jazz performance and helped shape James Dean’s moody public persona, died Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 81.
The cause was colon cancer, said the Magnum Photos cooperative, of which Mr. Stock had been a member and mainstay for six decades. Mr. Stock and his wife, the author Susan Richards, divided their time between Sarasota and Bearsville, N.Y.
Mr. Stock was one of those photographers whose names are not widely known but whose work is instantly recognizable. Perhaps his most emblematic image, taken in 1955, was that of a young Dean, on the cusp of stardom, walking through the rain in Times Square, shoulders hunched, a cigarette jutting from his mouth.
Two years later he began working on a series of portraits of jazz musicians. They were collected in his book “Jazz Street,” published in 1960 with a text by Nat Hentoff.
“He has managed to evoke jazz without the assistance of sound its places, its atmosphere, its times, its makers.” the critic and essayist Ralph Pomeroy wrote in “Contemporary Photographers” (1982).
Mr. Stock was himself the subject of a memorable portrait, by Andreas Feininger, in which he held a camera to his spotlighted face so that the lens appeared to be his right eye and the viewfinder his left eye.
“I always considered his work more soulful than influential,” said Philip Gefter, the author of “Photography After Frank” (Aperture, 2009) and a former picture editor for The New York Times. “His pictures are well seen, solid in that Magnum tradition, sexy in their way, and, to use his own term, visually articulate.”
Mr. Stock maintained an interest in photography until the end of his life. He submitted a half-dozen comments to Lens, The Times’s photojournalism blog, including this observation in May about the role of suffering in art:
“The goal for the photographer is to be visually articulate. If the subject is in a suffering circumstance, it is all the more preferable to apply craft to the utmost. Call it art or not, we photographers should always try to pass on our observations with the utmost clarity.”
Dennis Stock was born on July 24, 1928, in New York. He apprenticed under Gjon Mili from 1947 until 1951, when he came to national attention as one of 10 winners in Life magazine’s $15,000 Contest for Young Photographers.
Mr. Stock submitted a picture essay showing displaced Europeans arriving in New York. As a prize winner, he was in very good company, sharing honors with Robert Frank, Elliott Erwitt and Ruth Orkin, among others. At the time, when television was in its infancy, Life was arguably the most important visual showcase in the country.
Mr. Mili thought his student was ready to head out on his own. Magnum agreed. Mr. Stock was taken into the agency and admitted to full partnership in 1954.
“Now that he is gone, I realize that I vastly underestimated the talent of Dennis Stock,” said John G. Morris, former executive editor of Magnum and a former picture editor of The New York Times. “I think it was because he was such a pain in the neck to deal with in the business of Magnum. I used to affectionately call him Dennis the Menace.
“For me his early work was by far his best,” he continued. “Brilliant. His profile in pictures of James Dean, which I sold to Life magazine in 1955, helped put Dean on the movie map despite his death a few months later.”
Besides Ms. Richards, Mr. Stock is survived by three children, Rodney Stock, John Raymond and Christina Stock; a grandson; and five great-grand-children.
He also leaves friends like Ted Mase, a freelance photojournalist who first encountered Mr. Stock about six years ago while taking pictures in a Sarasota park.
“He said he was also a photographer, which I didn’t take notice of,” Mr. Mase recalled on Thursday. “Then he said he was with Magnum, and I thought the old boy was crazy. Found out it was true, and from that point on we just bonded.”
In a comment to Lens, Mr. Mase said, “Dennis, through Magnum and on his own, tried to do what he could to keep the integrity, honesty and high standards of this art form going in the right direction.”
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