Vintage 1964 Wallace Seawell Photograph Presidential Portrait Lyndon B. Johnson For Sale

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Seawell's embossed blind stamp in the bottom left corner of the photograph. His Flicker Way studio ink stamp to verso.CONDITION: Fine+ condition with trimmed margins and a small speck of discoloration in the right side of the photograph. Please use the included images as a conditional guide.********************Wallace Seawell (1916 — 2007)
Obituary By: Randy KennedyWallace Seawell, a celebrity photographer whose West Hollywood home was for decades one of the country’s most productive glamour factories, turning out thousands of portraits of movie stars, singers, presidents, kings and Gabor sisters (all three), died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 90.Mr. Seawell’s subjects, who sat for him in the pre-paparazzi days, when photographers tried to make stars look their best, included almost everyone who was someone in movies and music from the 1940s through the 1980s: Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, Sophia Loren, Nat King Cole, Janet Leigh, Jayne Mansfield, Audrey Hepburn, Tony Curtis, Paul Newman, Ava Gardner, Joan Collins and Diana Ross.President Lyndon B. Johnson, while in the White House, came to Mr. Seawell’s house to be photographed, as did the Shah of Iran, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Earlier in his career he was under a personal contract to Howard Hughes at RKO Pictures where he had an office adjoining Hughes’s.Mr. Seawell, who liked to be called just Seawell, made highly stylized portraits for many of the Hollywood celebrity magazines, like Photoplay and Screen Gems. He also took photographs for several studios and celebrity agencies.In interviews, he often sounded as star-struck as the fans for whom his photographs were intended. “It was the greatest time to be in Hollywood,” he said of his career, in an interview in 2000. “You could really get to know the stars then. They threw big parties in their homes, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to most of them.”Wallace Lacy Seawell was born Sept. 16, 1916, in Atlanta. When he was 7 his family moved to Sarasota, Fla., where teachers noticed his artistic talent. His early ambition was to be a painter, but he soon took up a camera and was accepted into a highly competitive photography program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He later was a set designer and fashion photographer in New York.After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job — one that would last 20 years — with Paul A. Hesse, then a leading commercial photographer on the West Coast. When Mr. Hesse retired, Mr. Seawell started his own business in his antique-filled home. He is survived by several nieces and nephews.Besides studio work, Mr. Seawell also took his camera on the road, accompanying the Harlem Globetrotters on three around-the-world tours and taking promotional photographs at far-flung tourist spots for Braniff, Pan Am and Scandinavian Airlines. He once served as the official photographer for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.For many years, Mr. Seawell shared his home with the actress Carol Channing and her husband and manager, Charles Lowe. In the late 1990s, he became enmeshed in their highly public divorce battle when Ms. Channing accused her husband of spending all his money on Mr. Seawell. Both men denied that this was the case. Mr. Seawell noted that he already had plenty of money.He described his success as a result of enthusiasm, something not especially hard to come by when taking pictures of Sophia Loren. “She was divine to work with,” he said in an interview. “The aura of the person excites you, and you’ve got to be excited or you won’t do a good job.”— Obituary By: Randy Kennedy c/o The New York Times******************** Paypal Buyers Are Invited To grapefruitmoongallery's Fresh sale Weekly Newsletter