Burt Glinn London Times Obituary April 11, 2008

Burt Glinn

Veteran Magnum photographer who won his spurs by recording Castro’s entry into Havana 

Burt Glinn’s instinct as a photographer was to go where his rivals were not. Never was this shown more to advantage than in 1959 when, allied to the necessary good fortune, he captured defining images of Fidel Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana and of Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to America.

On New Year’s Eve 1958 Glinn was at a party in New York hosted by the journalist Nick Pileggi (who later wrote the novel Wiseguy and adapted it as the film Goodfellas). Having heard a rumour that Cuba’s leader, Fulgencio Batista, had fled, and that Castro was advancing on the capital, Glinn immediately went home, borrowed some money from the neighbours of his fellow photographer Cornell Capa, took the precaution of changing out of his dinner jacket, and flew down to Miami.There he persuaded a pilot to take him to Havana, landing at the airport in the early hours just as it was being blockaded by the rebels. Venturing on to the city’s streets, he was congratulating himself on his daring when he realised that he knew neither Havana nor Spanish, and that gunfire was everywhere.

Within a day or two, however, he managed to get out into the countryside, where he encountered Castro’s victorious but ramshackle convoy. Every so often it would pull up at a petrol station, and Castro would get out to pay for everyone to fill up. Glinn enjoyed days of unfettered access to the revolutionaries and subsequently shot memorable pictures of them being greeted in Havana by crowds so thick that he lost his shoes.

Later that year he also covered Khrushchev’s trip to Washington, the first by any Soviet prime minister. Arriving tardily at a photocall at the Lincoln Memorial, Glinn found his way through barred by policemen, and was forced to find a spot behind the Soviet party. There he spotted the happy image of the Communist leader looking up at the symbol of American democracy, a photograph that was to become one of the most reprinted and lucrative of his career.

Though not as well known as many of his fellow Magnum photographers, Glinn was much admired by them. Not least, this was because of his work behind the scenes securing their copyright, both in two spells as president of the agency (1972-75, 1987), and as head in the 1960s of the American Society of Magazine Photographers.

This role involved him in much tough bargaining with the organisations that commissioned pictures, such as Life magazine. When the publishers’ lawyers argued that photographers would not get their images without having had their costs paid for by the magazines, Glinn liked to recall the indignant response of Henri Cartier-Bresson: 

“Yes, but it’s the skin off our eyeballs!”