Ray Platnick

[2] A February 19, 1944 portrait attributed to him[3][4][5][6] and made during the Battle, of United States Marine Corps Private Theodore James Miller (later killed there on March 24, 1944) boarding the Coast Guard-manned attack transport USS Arthur Middleton presents a famous example of the traumatised expression of combat fatigue.

[10] Cropped and enlarged as a tall ‘exclamation-mark’ at 228.7 × 81.3 cm, the photograph stood by the entrance to a darkened room which housed a giant back-lit colour transparency (in the original in New York, replaced by a monochrome print at other venues) of the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test, also on Eniwetok Atoll.

He reported for them on the 1941 Gimbel department store workers’ strike in which the protesters carried distinctive placards in the form of comic-strip frames, made up by the display department,[12] and also that year in an amusing series, he photographed Greenwich Village poets, including Diana Barrett Moulton, Maxwell Bodenheim and Joe Gould, in eccentric poses in front of their verses scrawled on the walls of the Village Arts Center at 1 Charles St.[13][14] He won the Grand Prize in the Spot News section of the New York Press Photographers’ Association 7th Annual Exhibition for What Makes Sammy Jump?

[20] Platnick's approach and style was that of the 1940s press corps, pre-35mm, in his invariable use of on-camera flash on a 4”x5” Speed Graphic press camera or similar; the scene is harshly ‘filed’ with artificial light and available light is underexposed to help ‘cut-out’ the subject from any distractions of the background, an effect which would frequently be enhanced by the newspaper retouchers’ airbrushing, as in the case of his 1948 shot Lean Polenberg and Marie Duke issuing traffic summonses, New York, held by the International Center of Photography.

[21] His use of instantaneous flash exposure caught fleeting expressions, often to amusing effect, animating what would otherwise be stilted and lifeless situations, as evident in his Jack Gilford at microphone of 1946[22] Platnick himself and his family were the subject of a photo story by Rae Russel in 1948, showing him with his cameras and in the darkroom.