American freelance magazine photographer and documentary film maker
Ike Vern (1916-1987) was an American freelance magazine photographer and documentary film maker.
Career
Ike Vern started taking photographs at 16 and worked professionally from 1938 and was employed by Click magazine.[1] He free-lanced for Look, Life, Redbook[2][3] and Collier's[4] amongst others in the 1940s and 1950s, and was a staff photographer for Holiday.[5] Articles on his photographic technique and on his more unusual assignments appeared regularly in Popular Photography.[6][1]
As early as 1942 with fellow Click magazine photographer Bradley Smith, as they were lunching with New York Post columnist and critic John Adam Knight, he raised the need for magazine photographers to “have some sort of club or something,”[12] which eventually materialised in the Society of Magazine Photographers which was renamed the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1946. Vern was a founding member and later a president of the Society.[13]
In 1955 Edward Steichen selected a photograph by Vern for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was seen by 9 million visitors. The carefully flash-lit shot shows two men earnestly playing checkers in a North Carolina grocery store amongst the packaged loaves of bread, jars of sweets and sacks of flour, surrounded by three onlookers; a bemused man drinking soda and three elderly women in aprons, while in the background a laden customer exits through the screen-doors onto the porch.
Later work
In the early 1970s Vern produced picture documentation of pollution around the chemical storage, petroleum depots and drainage outlets at Arthur Kill, Staten Island, for 'Documerica: The Environmental Protection Agency's Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern'.[14]
Forty-nine of these photographs are held at the National Archives Catalog.[15]
In the late 70s he created photographic murals for New York City high schools and La Guardia airport.[16]
Vern died in 1987 at age 70 after heart surgery at the Texas Heart Institute of St. Luke's Hospital in Houston and was survived by his wife Harriet (née Nutels), daughter, Jane Vern, of Manhattan, and brother, David, of Brooklyn.[17]
^Fox, Stuart; University of Southern California; World Zionist Organization. Organization and Information Dept; Arkhiv seraṭim be-nośʼim Yehudiyim ʻal shem Avraham F. Rad (1976), Jewish films in the United States : a comprehensive survey and descriptive filmography, G. K. Hall, ISBN978-0-8161-7893-3
^Joselit, J. W., Mittelman, K. S., & National Museum of American Jewish History (Philadelphia, Pa.). (1993). A Worthy use of summer: Jewish summer camping in America. Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, p. 43
^Popular Photography, Vol. 28, No. 3, Mar. 1951. p. 24
^Horowitz, Daniel (1998), Betty Friedan and the making of The feminine mystique : the American left, the cold war, and modern feminism, University of Massachusetts Press, ISBN978-1-55849-168-7
^Gilbert, George (1996), The illustrated worldwide who's who of Jews in photography (1st ed.), G. Gilbert, ISBN978-0-9656012-0-7
^Busselle, Michael (1985), The encyclopedia of photography, Octopus, ISBN978-0-7064-2373-0