L'Americain

Book excerpt: Before television, the great picture magazines captured world events for millions of readers. They sent correspondents and photojournalists to the ends of the earth to record history in the making. Among this elite was the photographer, John Launois. During the 1960s and 1970s, the final decades of the “golden age of photojournalism,” John Launois blossomed as one of the most resourceful, inventive, prolific, highly paid, and widely traveled photojournalists at work during that period. Launois made himself the master of the deeply researched photo essay, and his published work appeared in Life, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Fortune, Time, Newsweek, Look, Rolling Stone, Paris Match, London’s Sunday Times, and many other American, European, and Asian publications. This is his story told in his own words: from his youth amid the poverty and terror of German-occupied France during World War II when he dreamed of coming to America, to his lean “noodle years” in the Far East as he struggled to master his craft, to his years in America as a successful photographer and globetrotting adventurer. It was during this time that he recorded some of the most iconic images of the period—presidents, the Beatles, Malcolm X, wars, riots, and natural disasters. He also writes very candidly of the terrible toll the demands of his work imposed on his family, his loves, and himself. Through it all, he mingled with the rich, powerful, and downtrodden alike, always marveling that he had come so far.