NEW YORK — Burt Glinn, a photojournalist whose images of historic moments of the Cold War include Fidel Castro’s 1959 march on Havana and Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the U.S. that year, has died. He was 82.
Glinn, who lived in East Hampton, died on Wednesday, according to the Magnum Photos Inc. The cause of death was not immediately available.
Glinn began his career with the Magnum Photos agency in 1951 and photographed events in such locations as Japan, Russia and Mexico.
He also covered the Sinai War and the U.S. Marine invasion of Lebanon.
A highlight of Glinn’s career came on New Year’s Eve 1958, when he was in New York and got word that the dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba and that a ragtag band of revolutionaries led by Castro would be making a triumphant march into Havana.
“At seven in the morning I was in Havana at the airport figuring out how to find where this thing was going on,” Glinn said in an interview with Magnum Photo on the agency’s Web site.
“You can’t just get in a cab and say, ‘Take me to the Revolution.”‘ He was later able to get close enough to Castro to capture compelling images of the rebel in his fatigues as he met with supporters in the first days of the country’s upheaval.
Glinn’s other iconic image pictured the back of Khrushchev’s head in front of the Lincoln Memorial during his official visit to Washington, D.C. in 1959. Glinn attributed the shot of the Soviet Union’s premier to “luck” because he arrived late at the scene.
“If I’d been on time I could have gotten a very ordinary picture of Khrushchev and Henry Cabot Lodge looking at this statue of Lincoln but you couldn’t see the statue,” he said later.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1925, Glinn served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, studied at Harvard University and worked for Life magazine from 1949 to 1950 before joining Magnum Photos. He won numerous awards for his photography and his work has been widely exhibited, most recently at the Seattle Art Museum.
