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04/15/2008 - Burt Glinn, Award-Winning Foster Grant Photographer, Dies at 82Burt Glinn, a photojournalist, commercial photographer and former president of the Magnum photo agency, died on Wednesday in Southampton, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in East Hampton, N.Y.
The cause was kidney failure and pneumonia, his wife, Elena, said.
Burton Samuel Glinn was born in Pittsburgh on July 23, 1925. He entered Harvard in 1943 but left after a semester when he was drafted into the Army. He served in Germany, then returned to Harvard to study history and literature, graduating in 1949.
In addition to doing news and documentary work, he also produced memorable photographs of Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol and other celebrities.
He was a successful commercial photographer as well, with corporate clients that included Pepsico, General Motors and Revlon. He did advertising photography for I.B.M., T.W.A. and Seagram, among others, and won the award for the best print ad of 1972 from the Art Directors Club of New York for his work for Foster-Grant sunglasses.
In an interview given in January of 2007, Burt talked about his experience with Foster Grant. "I had the most fun with an advertising campaign for Foster Grant sunglasses. The punch line was 'Isn’t that Woody Allen behind those Foster Grants.' We had to spot six funny lines that Woody Allen would say in different characters. We did them with Woody Allen, Claudia Cardinale, Anthony Quinn, and Anita Ekberg. It was all very strange and very funny. We would fly to meet these people and the copy writer, the ad man, was a very, very funny guy, named Ray Brown. He would think up these different ideas for punch lines, and then we would rummage through somebody’s closet and find out if he had the right clothes. For the one we did with Anthony Quinn, we had ten or twelve different sunglasses so he could pick the sunglasses that would add to his character, which looked like a South American dictator with a Panama hat and sunglasses. We had more fun thinking up the lines than we had taking the pictures. The campaign ran for a couple of years. It was the punch line, and different people would say, 'Isn’t that so and so behind the Foster Grants?'"
In addition to his wife, who is known professionally as Elena Prohaska, he
is survived by his son, Sam, of Manhattan, and his sister, Norma Madden of Pittsburgh.
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