PARIS: Famed Iranian photo-journalist Shahrokh Hatami, who covered front-page events from the revolution in his homeland to the Beatles in their early days, has died aged 89.
Actress Francine Carpon, his partner, told AFP that he died from “pulmonary insufficiency at Auxi-le-Chateau” in northern France.
Born in Tehran in 1928 and starting his career as a journalist for an Iranian newspaper in 1950, Hatami’s roving lens captured a huge variety of events as he let his camera tell the stories.
Over seven decades he captured a dizzying array of stories; most notably the visual backdrop of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a US-sponsored coup in 1953 for Life Magazine.
A quarter of a century later, he shot dramatic images of the Iranian Revolution and was on the plane that took the Ayatollah Khomeini back to Iran in February 1979.
Hatami also covered the opening of the Suez Canal while his website listed several Middle East leaders such as Egyptian presidents Nasser and Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein as friends.
Apart from politics, Hatami also took various pictures for celebrities, most notably the Beatles, whom he shot in Liverpool’s iconic Cavern Club, sent by Paris Match as the Beatlemania was about take off.
From the early 1960s, he had also been working for Elle, offering a string of cover shots of some of the most famous women in the world such as Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ursula Andress.
But Hatami did not want any of the limelight for himself and was known by his inner circle to be a discreet and modest man.
A close friend and personal photographer of actress Sharon Tate, Hatami testified at her murder trial after she was killed in August 1969 along with four others by members of the Manson Family at the home she shared with husband Roman Polanski.
Hatami was also a friend and photographer to Paris fashion designer Coco Chanel, documenting several of her creations in the 1960s.
The rarified world of motion pictures also allured him and he worked as special magazine photographer on the sets of Woody Allen’s ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, Jean Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mepris’, and Francois Truffaut’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’.
On the sets of Rosemary’s Baby, he became friends with Mia Farrow and directed Mia and Romana, short 1968 documentary, during the making of the movie.