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Brownstein: Tribute planned for acclaimed lensman George S. Zimbel

Before settling in Montreal, he photographed U.S. presidents and, famously, Marilyn Monroe — but that's not the work he was most proud of.

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George S. Zimbel, a giant in the world of photography, died mid-January of natural causes at 93 in his adopted city of Montreal. 

Zimbel, whose career spanned nearly 70 years, was much acclaimed for his compelling photos of such U.S. presidents as Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy as well as his iconic shots of Marilyn Monroe, her skirt billowing alluringly over a subway grate while on the set of The Seven Year Itch. 

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Zimbel’s work had frequently appeared in the New York Times, Look and Life magazines and was hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among many other museums.  

He released his last book of photos, Momento, seven years ago. The same year, he was the subject of two documentaries — Zimbelism and The Night I Shot Marilyn, both co-directed by his son Matt Zimbel and Jean-François Gratton. Also that year, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented the exhibition George S. Zimbel: A Humanist Photographer, featuring 70 portraits, from innocent images of a baseball-tossing boy with an oversized glove and a young girl hopscotching on the street to those famed shots of U.S. presidents and Monroe.  

“To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know I was a ‘humanist’ photographer before this exhibit,” a chuckling Zimbel told me on opening night of the exhibit. “It was only recently that I found out this was a genre. But while I’m proud to be part of it, I still think of myself mainly as a streeter.” 

No surprise that Zimbel was more proud of the pics of the street kid with the huge glove and the hopscotching girl than those of major celebs and politicos. 

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Of note, he didn’t even look at his negatives of the 1954 Monroe shoot until 22 years later, when he developed the photos for the first time. 

Zimbel remained an unrepentant analog man in a digital world until the very end, an old-school lensman who favoured shooting black-and-white images on his trusty Leicas and developing them in his darkroom. 

Ever direct, he had a typically undiplomatic term for what he viewed as new-school photography: “digital diarrhea.” 

“It’s too easy now,” Zimbel relayed to me in another interview while developing a batch of pics in his Plateau darkroom. “That’s the problem. All you have to do is to press the button and shoot thousands of images without really focusing on what it is that captures the imagination.

“I follow a more primitive approach. … As long as I have my music and my darkroom, I’m happy enough. I would rather stay in the dark.” 

He described himself as “an upbeat photographer — but not an upbeat person.” 

A tribute to Zimbel’s life is being planned by his family at a site to be determined. Included in this homage will be a selection of Zimbel’s photos and excerpts from the docs Zimbelism and The Night I Shot Marilyn.  

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“I had asked him how he would like his funeral to go,” his filmmaker son Matt recalls. “He said: ‘Short. … Just say: “Thank you all for coming and amen.” ’  

“He would be more delighted to have people just look at this work than have them talk about him. He wasn’t into self-glorification. He was an artist. He had a magical view on the world. He saw things others didn’t.”  

George Zimbel was born outside Boston and later lived and worked in New York. It was his disenchantment with American politics, specifically relating to the Vietnam War, that led to Zimbel, a Korean War vet, and his family uprooting to Canada in 1971 “for a lifestyle change.” 

The family settled in Prince Edward Island, where Zimbel worked a farm. But 10 years later, he gave up the plow and they settled in Montreal — to the delight of his wife, Elaine (now deceased), and their four kids.  

“He was a fantastic father,” Matt says. “As someone who came from a merchant family, he was the artist in that family. He went through his own period of having to prove to his parents that the arts were a viable place to live. And as a result, he as well as my mother were always supportive of me and my brothers Andrew and Ike and my sister Jodi with whatever our pursuits were. It was a gift to grow up in a family like that.” 

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Matt mentions that upon deciding to leave P.E.I. for more of an urban experience, Montreal was the only city his parents considered. 

“They just loved it here, its artistic and design sensibility,” Matt says. “They quickly acclimatized themselves to the culture here. They were very much part of the Plateau community where they lived. They loved and were loved there. 

“Montreal was such a transformative city for my father. This is where he made his most profound transition from photojournalist and documentary photographer to art photographer.” 

Last words go to self-deprecating George from our interview: “The real beauty of these old-school photos I take is that they’ll still be in good shape 200 years from now … which is more than I can say for myself.”  

bbrownstein@postmedia.com

twitter.com/billbrownstein

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