Roy Emerson Stryker

4 March 1944

Son born: David Parks

from the mid-1940s

Becomes a fashion photographer for Vogue

After leaving the Office of War Information he moves to Harlem and works as a freelance fashion photographer for Vogue; editor Alexander Liberman, despite the racist attitudes of the day, hires him to shoot a collection of evening gowns. He develops a distinctive style of photographing his models in motion rather than in static poses, and his fashion work appears in Vogue from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s.

mid-1940s

Works on the Standard Oil project in New Jersey

After leaving the Office of War Information — where he photographed the all-black 332d Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen, and resigned when he could not follow them to the overseas war theatre — he follows Stryker to the Standard Oil Photography Project in New Jersey, whose photographers shoot small towns and industrial centers. His most striking pictures of these years include “Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown’s Home, Somerville, Maine” (1944), “Car Loaded with Furniture on Highway” (1945), “Self Portrait” (1945) and “Ferry Commuters, Staten Island, N.Y.” (1946).

1947–1948

His first two books on photography appear

“Flash Photography” appears in 1947 and “Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture” in 1948. From the late 1940s this second career as a writer will produce fifteen books.

1948

A photo essay on a Harlem gang leader brings him to Life

A photographic essay on a young Harlem gang leader wins him a staff job as photographer and writer at Life, America’s leading photo-magazine. He will stay there until 1972.

1948–1972

Photographs Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Barbra Streisand

In more than twenty years at Life he photographs fashion, sports, Broadway, poverty and racial segregation, as well as portraits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Barbra Streisand. Malcolm X asks him to be the godfather of his daughter Qubilah Shabazz.