Ralph Morse
"[2] During his thirty years at Life, Morse covered assignments including science, theater, fads and spot news[clarification needed].
Photographer Jim McNitt, who worked with Morse on several Time magazine assignments in the 1970s, described him as a fun-loving extrovert who was delighted to mentor an aspiring photojournalist.
"Watching Ralph plan his shots, respond to editors, and deal with reluctant subjects with off-hand humor taught me things I couldn't learn in photo magazines or workshops," said McNitt.
Aspiring to become a newsreel cameraman but lacking the requisite $1,000 to join the union, Morse instead entered the City College of New York for free and took every class offered in photography.
[2] Paul Parker was a social photographer with such customers as the United Fund and the Red Cross, a type of photography of great interest to Morse.
Morse stayed with Parker for most of a year until hearing of a job of hanging lights for George Karger, a German banker turned photographer who was freelancing through Pix Publishing, an agency in New York that sold pictures around the world.
Morse bought himself his first camera equipment and began buying The New York Times every day in order to select events to photograph, creating pictures which Daniel then sold instantly.
Of the three owners of Pix, one was a silent partner, Alfred Eisenstaedt, a photographer who had left the Associated Press in Germany to join the new Life magazine staff in New York City.
Eisenstaedt closely observed Morse's photographing while encouraging Wilson Hicks, the picture editor of Life, to meet the young upstart at Pix.
The success of this assignment earned him a second—capturing on film women buying hats for their husbands in the basement of Gimbels department store—which turned out to be Morse's first photo story published by Life.
War coverage was the ultimate on-the-job training, needing to learn on the spot such feats as descending rope ladders overloaded with both combat and photographic gear in order to accompany troops from ship to shore.
He arranged for the captain of the USS Vincennes (CA-44), the Navy ship on which Morse had arrived, to deliver his film to Washington, D.C., as such pictures needed to be screened before being printed.
[10] Morse's film and equipment went down with the ship while he trod water all night amidst destroyers dropping depth charges on submarines, fortunately scaring away the sharks and barracuda.
With neither cameras nor clothing, Morse made a secret pact with Naval command to return briefly to Life in New York to re-equip, but was mandated to tell no details of the sea battle, no explanation of how he lost his equipment.
Guadalcanal grew a jungle so thick that accompanying nocturnal troop movement was filled with the risk of abandonment if one ever lost sight of the soldier's foot he was following.
Life magazine and newspapers around the country ran Morse's photo; it proved to be the first horror picture released by the censors of World War II.
The photos of this soldier in pain and his arms being placed in casts, considered a model of effective photojournalism, are the commonly used pictures of the wounded of World War II.
[12] Morse was witness to the invasion at Normandy,[13] air raids in Verdun, General Charles de Gaulle's peace parade in Paris, and Hermann Göring's trial at Nuremberg.
He accompanied a Frenchman by open rail and hitched rides all the way from the German concentration camp where he had been enslaved back to the dinner table with the family members from whom he had been estranged for four years.
[3] A decade after photographing the post-war reconstruction of Europe, Morse received his next singular assignment: documenting American preparations to explore outer space.
Forewarned that Jackie Robinson would try to steal home, Morse rigged the camera with a foot switch set to fire a hundred feet of film at ten frames a second.
[16] Technically similar, in covering the hundred yard dash in New York's Madison Square Garden, Morse wanted to put the start, middle, and finish of the race in the same picture.
Later, they settled in northern New Jersey, where they raised their three sons, Alan, Bob, and Don, as Morse's work was based out of the Time-Life Building in New York City.
When schedules permitted, the family joined Morse on his photographic assignments, including journeys to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch missiles being launched.
