Allan Grant, a Life magazine staff photographer who captured such historic moments as the atomic bomb tests in the Nevada desert to some of the last photos of Marilyn Monroe before her suicide, has died. He was 88.
Grant died at his home in Brentwood on February 1, said his wife, Karin Grant.
Among the more famous moments Allan Grant shot were Howard Hughes flying for less than minute in the mammoth Spruce Goose in 1947 and best-actress nominees Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly waiting backstage at the 1955 Academy Awards.
Grant received his first camera at age 10 when he traded a model airplane with another boy.
While still in school, he got a job washing photographs in a commercial photo lab. To make money, he began teaching cocktail waitresses to take pictures, developed the photographs in the bathroom of a nearby boarding house and sold them.
After leaving Life in the late 1960s, Grant produced educational documentaries for which he received three Emmy nominations.
Toward the end of his life Grant was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which gradually crippled his ability to take photos. — Sapa-AP