GEORGE SILK

Photographer George Silk was born November 17, 1916, in Levin, New Zealand. An amateur photographer, he went to work in a camera shop at 16. When the war began, in 1939, he was hired as a combat photographer for the Australian Ministry of Information, assigned to follow Australian troops through North Africa, Greece and New Guinea. In Libya with the Desert Rats of Tobruk, Mr. Silk was captured by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's forces. He escaped 10 days later. In New Guinea, he took what is probably his most famous photograph, in December 1942. The photo shows a blinded Australian soldier, barefoot, eyes bandaged, being led through the remote countryside by a traditionally clad tribesman. The image got Silk hired at Life the next year. For Life, Silk photographed Allied forces in Europe and, at the end of the war, he commandeered a B-29 to take aerial photos of a devastated Japan. In 1946, he shot a photo essay on famine in China's Hunan Province. For the rest of his career, Mr. Silk worked primarily as a sports photographer, developing techniques that allowed him to snatch images from previously impossible vantage points -- the surface of a ski, the end of a surfboard. Silk and his wife, Margery Gray Schieber had three children: Stuart, Georgiana, and Shelley. Silk died on October 23, 2004.