Yankee Nomad A Photographic Odyssey Author:David Douglas Duncan David Douglas Duncan is one of the veterans of camera reporting. Yankee Nomad is his own story -- often violent, sometimes gentle, always action-filled -- highlighted by more than 500 of his photographs, 130 of them in color. — A former Life magazine photographer, David Duncan has traveled the earth on assignments ranging from bizarre to da... more »ngerous; he has photographed many of the most powerful and unusual figures of our time, including Gandhi, Nehru, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, the legendary Ibn Saud, Maurice Chevalier and Picasso. Duncan's genius is to capture the one vignette that epitomizes a turn of history -- or the character of his subject. Two of his earlier works, The Kremlin and Picasso's Picassos, were the first "art" books to appear on best-seller lists.
The photographs in Yankee Nomad are at once an intensely personal record of an extraordinary existence and a perceptive commentary on the world of the mid-century decades of war and peace.
Compiled over a period of thirty years, and containing nearly 100,000 words, the photo-text sequences in Yankee Nomad include:
Arizona, 1934 With his first camera, Duncan unknowingly "shoots" gangster John Dillinger.
Peru, 1940 Giant killer squids of the Humboldt Current, never before photographed.
Philippine Islands, 1945 A Japanese traitor guides American bombers to his jungle headquarters.
Tokyo Bay, 1945 The Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. "Missouri".
Iran, 1946 On migration across Persia with Qashqai nomads.
Palestine, 1946 The fight for free-Israel.
India, 1947 Mountbatten relinquishes power to Nehru.
Saudi Arabia, 1948 An oil gusher is burned intentionally for Duncan.
Korea, 1950 The liberation of Seoul; Marines freeze, fighting out of Chinese trap.
Germany, 1952 The birth of the Iron Curtain.
Egypt, 1952 King Farouk's foolish world; the first nationalistic African revolution.
Indochina, 1953 Roots of the war in Viet-Nam.
Morocco, 1955 The idyllic life of the Berbers in a real Shangri-la.
Afghanistan, 1955 Crossroads of tyrants and gods -- nomad Duncan's favorite desert wilderness.
Soviet Union, 1956 The Kremlin; Khrushchev shouting "We'll bury you!"
Ireland, 1956, Connemara -- enchanted land of the leprechauns.
Picasso, 1957-62 The Picasso no on has ever seen -- as an Apache chief. Duncan ruins Picasso's last known self-portrait.
Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Era and a book that never was. Duncan's letters to Mrs. John F. Kennedy declining a White House invitation to make a book entitled The White House; Duncan's reasons for refusal -- the only regret in his professional life.
Yankee Nomad concludes with a magnificent photographic essay on Paris -- the revolutionary sequence that brought (from McCall's magazine) the highest price ever paid for a picture story.« less