page_title: William Vandivert
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: William Vandivert / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Front cover of the March 12, 1945, issue of Life magazine, featuring a photograph of Lieutenant General William Hood Simpson, commander of the U.S. Ninth Army in Europe
context_page_description: William "Bill" Vandivert was an American photographer, co-founder in 1947 of the agency Magnum Photos.
context_section_description: Vandivert joined the Life magazine team in London in 1938.
  He was one of the few photographers who were working in color photography before the Second World War.
  Vandivert made color photo report in Paris in the summer of 1939. He was using Kodachrome. The following year he photographed in color the Blitz in London.
  For Life in 1943 he was in India to produce a harrowing series on the Bengal Famine, with photographs of an elderly woman dying by the roadside, an old man’s ribs poking through his bare chest, truck sweepers cleaning corpses off the streets, and the starved dead being cremated in the street. One of the series, captioned Terribly concentrated on food, child stuffs self at Ramkrishna Mission Ashram near Calcutta was chosen in 1955 by curator Edward Steichen for the section 'Famine' in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, that was seen by 9 million visitors.
  He covered the Second World War in various theatres of European operations. At Gardelegen concentration camp, Vandivert took photographs reproduced in the May 7, 1945 issue of Life that show in detail the remains of hundreds of political prisoners who were locked in a warehouse when the German camp guards set it on fire; an atrocity discovered by Allied troops arriving on April 14, two days later. Printed quarter-page size, some show corpses that are still smouldering, while one picture filling page 35 illustrates an overview from inside the warehouse and the enormity of the atrocity.
  In April 1945, Vandivert was the first Western photojournalist to photograph the Berlin ruins and the Adolf Hitler bunker, published by Life in July 1945.
  Vandivert left Life's editorial team in 1946.
caption: A 1945 Life cover by Vandivert
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