Bill Eppridge

If you happen to be channel surfing in the coming week, you may catch me on the air chatting about the release of A Time It Was. If you’d like to tune in, here’s a rundown of what the very kind folks at Judy Twersky public relations have set up:

Sunday, June 1st, 2008: I’m scheduled to be on CBS Sunday Morning this weekend. (You can find local listings here.) Update: Video is now online.

Thursday, June 5th, 2008: If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be on The Today Show at some point during the 8 o’clock hour, after which I’ll make my way over to WNYC 93.9 FM Radio to talk to Leonard Lopate. His show airs at noon. If you’re not in NYC, you can also listen in online.

Friday, June 6th, 2008: Joe Scarborough’s morning program, Morning Joe, on MSNBC, will have me on as a guest about 8 a.m.

Thanks again for all of the support!

This week, I wrote an item for the folks over at SportsShooter.com that looks at what it was like to cover Bobby Kennedy in ‘68 versus what it’s like to cover Barack Obama in ‘08. (I recently attended an Obama rally in Philly). A lot has changed. Read the full piece here.

The book got written up in the May 19th edition of PW. Here’s what the reviewer has to say:

From the “tens of thousands” of photographs he took of Robert Kennedy, former Life magazine photographer Eppridge has culled his most evocative images for this “photographic history of one of the nation’s most compelling figures,” published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Following Kennedy from 1966, Eppridge chronicled Kennedy’s ‘68 presidential campaign trail, his battles with Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries and victory in California, which would have sent “his campaign into orbit.” Soon after the victory speech, Eppridge heard eight gunshots—“the sound I will never forget”—and snapped the grim final images of Kennedy, bleeding in the arms of a stunned supporter. A devastated Eppridge captured the national grief that followed, the funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C., attended everywhere by “a cross-section of America… old, young, women, men, black, white.” The photographer’s dual focus on the candidate (whose back, legs and hands are caught more often than his full face) and his audience (caught reaching, touching, running alongside, and lastly, saluting) speaks powerfully and wordlessly of Bobby Kennedy’s charismatic presence in the late ’60s.

Check out the rest of the review here.

© Bill Eppridge.

The book got a nice mention in Tim Rutten’s column about Obama in today’s L.A. Times.

My book on Bobby Kennedy made the Amazon list of hot new releases this morning. Thanks for the support!

The Chaney family as they depart for the burial of James Chaney, Meridian, Mississippi, August 7, 1964. (© Bill Eppridge)

Some of my pictures from the civil rights era, including the image of the Chaney family, above, will be included in an upcoming exhibition at the High Museum, in Atlanta, called Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. The show opens on June 7th and runs until October 5th. Get all the details on the High Museum’s website.

Photos from my book about RFK’s campaign are in the June ‘08 Vanity Fair. See the online photo essay.