Joe O'Donnell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the football player of the same name see Joe O'Donnell (football player).
Joseph (Joe) Roger O'Donnell (May 7, 1922 – August 9, 2007) was an American documentary photographer, photojournalist and a photographer for the United States Information Agency. Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, his most famous work was documenting photographically the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb explosions at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 and 1946 as a Marine photographer.
He died in Nashville, Tennessee.
A controversy followed the printing of his obituary in the press. Some of the photographs that had been attributed to O'Donnell were actually shot by other photographers. [1] A photograph of a saluting John F. Kennedy Jr. during the funeral for his father in 1963 was taken by Stanley Stearns for United Press International, not by O'Donnell. O'Donnell also claimed credit for a photograph showing Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill during a wartime meeting in Tehran, Iran, in 1943, but O'Donnell is not known to have been in Tehran at the time. O'Donnell's son Tyge O'Donnell attributes some of the instances of his father's taking credit for others' work to the onset of dementia in the 1990s.
[edit] References
- ^ Wilson, Michael (September 15), “Known for Famous Photos, Not All of Them His”, The New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/nyregion/15photographer.html>
[edit] External links
- The Phoenix Venture website featuring O'Donnell's photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- AP article on the photo controversy by Travis Loller
- National Press Photographers Association article on O'Donnell and the obituary controversies
- The Times Obituary
- Japan 1945--A U.S. Marine’s Photographs from Ground Zero, photos by Joe O'Donnell
- Info from a pending documentary of Joe O'Donnell by David Tower
- Editor & Publisher article on the obituary controversy by Greg Mitchell
- Clark Hoyt, "Pictures Worth a Thousand Questions", New York Times, September 16, 2007
