![]() Within a year of being added to LIFE’s legendary roster of photographers in 1955, he won photojournalism’s most prestigious award when he was named Magazine Photographer of the Year. Not only did it speak of the courage, ambition, and inventiveness that would carry him to the top of his chosen profession, but of the heightened perspective that working for LIFE would afford him for decades to come. In retrospect, Grey’s sensational edge of the ledge image could be viewed as a metaphor for what was to follow. What he saw was not just a stunning image that LIFE week as its “Speaking of Pictures,” but precisely the sort of resourcefulness the editors looked for in photographers. ![]() ![]() Bryson found the resulting 3 images on the single contact sheet that the newcomer from South Africa turned in later that day. With hopes of working for the magazine in jeopardy, he had taken himself to a a nearby office building, ridden the elevator to a 55th floor and asked a group of office workers on lunch break to “take a picture out the window.” Folding his 6’4”frame out onto the narrow ledge,he leaned forward to shoot straight down over his dangling feet before horrified office workers could pull him to safety. He had come to this perilous perch when that trial assignment from Bryson to photograph a man said to feed thousands of pigeons at the New York Public Library had proven worthless. So it was that Grey's Villet’s career with LIFE magazine began in April of l954 on the outer ledge of a Manhattan skyscraper high above 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. Grey Villet photographing "The Pigeon Man", 1954 with his portfolio.They sent him to see John Bryson, then picture editor at Life who saw talent in his work and gave him the test assignment still titled in LIFE records as "Pigeon Man" he spent most of his time bending iron for a furniture wholesaler until he approached the personnel department at Time Inc. Already determined to become a "magazine photographer" he quit the Star on the spot and soon set off for New York hoping to land a chance at LIFE magazine. With no connections, little money, and a new wife who was expecting a child. At 24 he returned to South Africa and a job at the country's leading newspaper, the Johannesburg Star-but the pomposity of management's objection to his disheveled look after a night of chasing a rough news story decided his future. At 20 he landed a job on the Bristol Evening News-and within 2 years had moved up to Reuters International in London on the strength of his newspaper work. It didnt take he spent most of his time at a cafe downtown where there was music and a lot of smoke.At about this time his sister's fiance gave him a camera and that did take.It was the excitment of seeing his own pictures emerge in a friend's dark room that set the course of his life.īy the late 1940's, his despairing father sent him to London to study photography-but after a few months Grey left school to earn a meager living doing wedding snaps outside the Registry while living in a trucker's stop hostel. His father expected him to follow him into medicine and Grey was duly enrolled in the pre-med program at Cape Town University. While he was still a boy his doctor father moved the family to Cape Town where he grew up. ![]() Grey Villet was born in a sheep herding center called Beaufort West in the Karoo desert of South Africa in 1927. In an era before any digital tinkering with his results was possible,Villet's was a technique that required intense concentration, patience and understanding of his subjects joined with a technical mastery that allowed rapid use of differing cameras and lenses to capture and compose the "right stuff" on film as it happened. ![]()
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