During a storied career that has spanned more than four decades, photojournalist Bill Eppridge has covered a remarkable assortment of stories for renowned national publications such as National Geographic, LIFE magazine and Sports Illustrated.
His collective assignments read like a list of the most important historical and cultural events from the latter half of the 20th Century. Eppridge recorded the Beatles’ first momentous visit to the United States. He photographed a young Barbra Streisand—living in a tiny railroad apartment in Manhattan—on the verge of super stardom. He was the only photographer admitted into Marilyn Lovell’s home as her husband, Jim, made his nail-biting re-entry into the atmosphere in the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft. He captured Clint Eastwood on the set of Dirty Harry. He was at Woodstock. And he was in Vietnam. He covered the funeral of civil rights activist James Chaney in Mississippi. His landmark photographic essay on Needle Park heroin addiction won the National Headliner Award and inspired the motion picture Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino. That photo essay is included in Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, the 2005 ICP award-winning book by World Press Photo.
Eppridge spent much of 1966 and 1968 on the road with Robert F. Kennedy, covering the presidential campaign for LIFE magazine. It was Eppridge who took one of the decade’s most poignant and iconic photographs: a stunned Los Angeles busboy, Juan Romero, cradling the candidate in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, just seconds after he was shot. The picture has been described as a modern Pietà.
Bill Eppridge runs alongside a car carrying Robert Kennedy. © Burton Berinksy.
Eppridge was born on March 20, 1938, in Argentina, to American parents. His father was a chemical engineer for Dupont, a job that took him to South America, in addition to a number of other international locations. After Argentina, the family transferred to the United States, where they lived, for various periods, in Richmond, Va., Nashville, Tenn., and Wilmington, Del.
Eppridge attended the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, where he graduated with a major in photojournalism in 1959. In that same year, while still a student at Missouri, he won the National Press Photographer’s Award, First Prize Pictorial for a picture of a lone white horse under tornadic skies. That contest, and others, led to an internship at LIFE magazine, where he would work under the magazine’s celebrated photo director, Roy Rowan.
After college, Eppridge embarked on a nearly year-long assignment for National Geographic, where he followed the International School of America as its staff and students traveled around the world. Roughly a year later, a chance encounter with Rowan on a New York City street, would lead to regular shooting assignments at LIFE. He joined the magazine as a staff photographer in the early sixties—joining the ranks of prominent photojournalists such as Alfred Eisenstadt, Carl Mydans and Gordon Parks—and stayed until the magazine folded in 1972.
That same year, Eppridge joined Sports Illustrated as a staff photographer, where he covered nearly every Winter Olympics since Lake Placid in 1980. He also shot six years worth of Americas Cup campaigns. But his assignments weren’t just limited to sporting events: Eppridge also photographed the aftermath of the explosion of Mount St. Helen’s in Washington and worked on various stories about poaching and big game hunting in Kenya. His sporting essays have taken him around the world, including Africa, Thailand, Yugoslavia and Australia.
Throughout his career Eppridge has been a respected force in training a new generation of photojournalists at the University of Missouri Photojournalism Workshop, as well as at the Eddie Adams Photography Workshop, and Photography at the Summit, in Wyoming. His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Museum of Television and Radio, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Visa Pour L’Image in Perpignon, France and in galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe. A comprehensive exhibit of his photographs of the Beatles are currently on a worldwide tour, and, in the spring of 2008, went on exhibit in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool.
When Eppridge is not shooting, he’s often flyfishing. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Adrienne Aurichio.
