Austrian-born American photojournalist Lisl Steiner, who captured images of John F. Kennedy, Pelé, Louis Armstrong and other great figures of the 20th century, has died at the age of 95 from complications of an infection, her family announced.
Steiner died this Wednesday at a hospital in Pound Ridge, New York City where he had lived for years. in a house provided by a friend.
Born in Austria on November 19, 1927, Lisl Steiner and her family immigrated to Argentina in 1938 to escape the Nazis. In Argentina, He attended art classes and became involved with the Madi avant-garde movement, while also becoming interested in cinema.
He worked in the production of more than 50 documentaries in Argentina, from 1945 to 1953, but his great passion until the end of his days was photography.
The first published photograph of Lisl Steiner appeared in Time and Lie magazines when the photographer was 30 years old, capturing a snapshot of Argentine President Pedro Eugenio Aramburu fishing in Patagonia.
After working for various Argentine and Brazilian media, in 1960 she moved to New York, where she worked as a freelance photographer for Time, Life, Newsweek and various international magazines, newspapers and agencies.
Steiner became known for photographs such as the one she took of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro’s boots in 1957, before he came to power, or those of the funeral of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy.
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he photographed personalities such as Pablo Casals, Carmen Amaya, Gyula Kosice, Pablo Neruda, Louis Armstrong, Pelé, Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andy Warhol.
In 2022, he was a prominent personality at the international photography festival in the Spanish city of Alicante (PhotoAlicante), where he exhibited for the first time a selection of his photographs from “Children of the Americas”, a project that crossed the career of the photographer and documentary filmmaker between 1959 and the 1970s.
With the title “The intuitive lens of Lisl Steiner”, he presented at the Museum of the University of Alicante (MUA) more than 40 photographs that show the situation of childhood in the countries of the American continent, together with another 30 of other themes and periods.
During the last 20 years of his life, Steiner devoted part of his time to lecturing to young photography students at a college in his native country.
Steiner developed a photographic work under very free precepts. “I was attracted to the idea of the Spanish painter Juan Gris, who once said that the greatest freedom lies in improvisation”, reads a quote from the photographer transcribed in the Alicante exhibition catalogue.
Source: Observadora
