John G. Morris


John Godfrey Morris was an American picture editor, author and journalist, and an important figure in the history of photojournalism.

Early life and family background

Morris was born on December 7, 1916 in Maple Shade, New Jersey and grew up in Chicago.
His father, John Dale Morris, born in 1869 on a Missouri farm, was a salesman who started out selling dictionaries, then encyclopedias. He founded a book publishing company named John D. Morris & Company of Philadelphia but went broke during the Panic of 1907. His father later worked for Chicago-based La Salle Extension University that provided extension courses.
His mother, Ina Arabella Godfrey, was the daughter of a doctor in Colon, Michigan. She studied Greek and Latin classics and joined the Grand Tour of Europe before working for John D. Morris & Company. She met John Dale Morris and they married in 1908, giving birth to their first child, a girl, in 1909.

Career

At the University of Chicago, John G. Morris and friends issued a student newspaper Pulse in September, 1937 which they published until March, 1941, when America became involved in WW2. It was a bold attempt to launch their careers in journalism, described by Morris as; "a radically different college publication, its news section modelled on Time, a monthly survey in the manner of Fortune, and photographs of the candid-camera type, like those in Life” The colleagues went into professional careers: Paul Berg became a staff photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, John Corcoran for Science Illustrated, Myron Davis for Life, and David Eisendrath for the Chicago Times and New York's PM.
Morris graduated in 1938, then obtained a job in the mailroom of Time-Life publications before moving up to a role as Life’s Hollywood correspondent, working for the weekly picture magazine throughout World War II and becoming Life's London picture editor. There, he was responsible for the coverage of the invasion of France on June 6, 1944 – D-Day, and edited the historic photographs of Robert Capa.
After the war he became successively the picture editor of the U.S. monthly Ladies' Home Journal, executive editor of Magnum Photos, assistant managing editor for graphics of The Washington Post in the 1960s and picture editor of The New York Times from 1967-73.
He continued his career during the Vietnam War. In 1968 he insisted that a photo by Eddie Adams of the Associated Press, showing a South Vietnamese police official in the act of executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head, be run on the front page of the New York Times. Four years later, he selected another photo by Nick Ut, showing a naked and screaming Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.
In 1983, Morris moved to Paris, as the European correspondent of National Geographic. As a freelance writer and editor, his primary concern was working for peace. He turned 100 in December 2016.

Personal life

Morris was married three times, first to Mary Adele Crosby who died in 1964 in childbirth along with the baby. His second wife, Marjorie Smith, died in 1981. His third wife, photographer Tana Hoban, died in 2006. He was survived by his partner, Patricia Trocme from Paris, along with four children and four grandchildren. He died on July 28, 2017 at a hospital in Paris, aged 100.

Awards

His autobiography, Get the Picture: a Personal History of Photojournalism, was published in 1998. He was co-author of Robert Capa: D-Day, in French and English.
In 2014, his book, Quelque Part en France - L'Été 1944 de John G. Morris, was published. The book was conceived by Robert Pledge of Contact Press Images. It contains the photographs Morris took during his Summer 1944 trip to Normandy, shortly after the D-Day landing on June 6, 1944, and the letters to his wife written "somewhere in France."

Publications edited by Morris