here anyone who's good with cameras? okay, we got one so i'm not good with cameras and if there are any technical questions about what kind of camera did he use and how wide what was the millimeter of the film? like, i don't know that kind of stuff i can get you answers, but i just want to be clear like i can talk about the man in a broad sense. i'm not very very good on the technology if you will. so without further ado ralph morris. he was born october 23rd 1917 in new york city. he was born in manhattan. he ended up moving to the bronx as a one-year-old and if you think about 1917 what was going on during that time period we had the end of world war one. we also had the pandemic which actually took the life of his father. so he grew up very early on without his father around because he passed away during the fluent epidemic. he was kind of a small guy. he wasn't really tall wasn't really big wasn't really athletics sort of kind of just, you know was sort of in between sort of the popular kids and the wrestling in the sports and all the things that you know, the popular kids do but he had a real affinity for sort of imagery, which you can imagine at this time period was a new thing, you know, photography had been around obviously for 50, you know, 60 70 years at that point, but getting it out into the public's hands into newspapers into things like that. that was still relatively a new phenomenon. so he was very interested in an early age in imagery so you can imagine him gobbling up any newspaper. he could get his hand on that type of thing. he actually joined the school newspaper in high school was issued a camera which was a big deal for the school at that time. he had to get the money for it and it was a big deal. it was super expensive. he talks about this whole ordeal of being the photographer for the school and his oral history about that is very interesting because it's something we sort of take for granted here, you know at schools today. he had a couple jobs. he worked at a drug store and he did that at night which was interesting. he worked at a fountain soda sort of drugstore serving ice cream floats and things like that, but the whole idea of his working was so that he could save up and get a camera for himself which he did and he ended up started, you know, just walking around taking pictures. stuff in his neighborhood asking his neighbors if he would like, you know. hey, can i take a picture of you kind of thing? so really wasn't his blood from an early age and his passion for that was clear. after high school he ends up not going to college but he gets a couple of different jobs that sort of set him on his path to become a famous photographer. he worked for a company called pics pix which actually sounds like a fancy new app or something like that, but it's an old school photography company newspaper and he worked for them and how he got discovered was he came in with his camera one day and he had taken some pictures of a man on his street throwing his little three year old baby up in the air and he catches this perfect picture of the kid at the apex of the throw and the kids got a smile on his face the dad smile, and it's just a really happy photo and the head of that little company said if you give me this picture, i'll pay you for it and we'll run it tonight. like it'll run tonight and that's what happened. and so rest was sort of sort of history in a sense one of the silent partners are one of the partners. that picks was a man named alfred eisenstadt who actually would be one of the solid silent partners that formed with other different photography companies that made the initial investment into what would become life magazine. so that's how he had sort of that life magazine connection from right off the bat was this work he was doing for picks. so a year, he actually gets hired by life magazine for a year leading into the war, but he's hired in sort of a how would you say like a contractor sense? he's basically told he can work one day a month for life magazine. so he comes in one day a month and has all his pictures and learns everything you can so it's sort of a weird arrangement, but that's initially how we got his foot in the door and when he was there he actually got to work with a guy named cornell capa who was robert kappa's brother. robert kappa is the famous photographer who took the pictures on d-day of the guys coming out of the landing craft and famously only six of them survived so he had another connection there with someone who would become very famous later on as a result of world war two. um, so morris's first story that was running life magazine. it must have been a fascinating one, but he took pictures of women buying hats for their husbands. apparently. this was a big deal women getting out and doing something for their man shopping getting him a tux that kind of thing. so there's this department store called gimbals in the 1930s and he takes this famous run of photos of all these women buying hats and gimbals and that's his first story in life magazine for someone who would go on to take the photograph some later going to describe to you. it's a very sort of unassuming beginning. so by the time world war two rolled around he had already had one feature story run with life magazine and so he was sort of already on the radar and he was only 23 years old at this time period but he was offered a job by the us navy and he turned it down. the reason he turned it down is because he didn't want to operate within the confines of the us navy. he didn't want to essentially become a soldier sailor. he didn't want to go through boot camp. he didn't want to do a lot. he's like, i'm just here to take the pictures guys. but after he declined this job from the us navy, he was hired full-time by life magazine and four years old. he was the youngest war correspondent sent to cover the war in the war going on throughout the world and specifically he ended up in the pacific first. morris i'd like to say is kind of like the the forrest gump of like photography in the 21st century. he he in the 20th century. he essentially is just at every place at the right time and just happens to get these unbelievable photographs the first thing that he sort of runs into or is put into he sent out to hawaii shortly after pearl harbor's attacked and he's you know, enjoying a couple of months of island life not really doing too much then all the sudden he's called to the pearl harbor sort of the aircraft carrier docking area and he's met by william f halsey whose name known as william. bullsey. that was his affectionate nickname, but he was the commander the enterprise at that time and he said, how would you like to come aboard the enterprise? we're going out into the pacific. he's like that's what i'm here to do. and so he gets on the enterprise and about two days after he gets on the enterprise halsey comes over the the ship's radio communications equipment and says, we're going to be launching 16 planes from the deck of the hornet towards japan to go bomb them. they're not going to land back on the hornet and the whole idea of this mission is to attach japan. so more finds out just sort of by chance that he's on the doolittle raid, which is kind of neat. he took several of there are several people there who photographed the delray there's a famous archival shot of the hornet and doolittle coming off first, but there were a lot of famous photographs taken as well and the majority of those were taken by ralph moore. so that was his first sort of foray if you will into photographing things that were happening during the war. i'm gonna get to these images in a second, but i just wanted to put them up there there a couple of images. i know the one on the left is not great for a lunch box lecture, but we'll get to that story because it's a very important photo here in a second one of the few. examples of morse being in the the right. he's there at the right time, but he's in the wrong place. he knew based off some of the radio communications and some of the way the ships were being moved. and also what he was being told by the navy that there was a big action coming up which would end up being the battle of midway. i was really excited to talk to him about midway because it's like, you know, it's this great battle in world war two. it's like this decisive moment in history. i remember asking mr. morris said, so tell me about the battle of midway and he looked at me said i didn't see anything. and i was like, okay like is that all you have to say about he's like, yeah, i didn't see anything like we're on a ship. we were 70 miles away. i didn't see anything. that's just how it goes. so that's what happened him during midway. he listened to the whole battle over the radio, but the battle never took place over any area that he could see within his little circumference of you know, he could see 22 miles to the edge of the horizon, but he never saw a japanese plane. he never saw an american plane and yet he was technically there during the battle of midway. so he missed that one from a photography standpoint. um, but really where morris become sort of a legend and this is really what launches his career from sort of just a guy at life magazine to the guy at life magazine and it's this famous photograph on the left here, but before we get to that morse actually had he had a really amazing experience on guadal canal for someone who is a photographer. he was assigned to. pictures of the marines landing on august 7th 1942 and if you know anything about that moment, you actually know that it's not the most well filmed event the landing at guadalcanal morse to hundreds of pictures of this event, but he would end up losing almost every single one of them. morse was not allowed to be on the ground at guadalcanal. in fact if he went on shore he had to have special people accompanying him but at night he had to go sleep on the uss vincennes, which was a cruiser designation, ca 44. it was the last new orleans class cruiser built to the standards of the washington naval treaty. it's very historic ship and then sends a very historic name the navy said about four different vincennes through its history, but on the night of august 8th, the battle of savoy island one of seven about one of about seven naval engagements the us military had us navy had at guadal canal the us of incense is sunk and ralph is on the ship and so he they call him to general quarters and and everyone's running around and as they're about to man their battle stations to japanese torpedo slam into the vincennes and ralph had to jump over the side and for about five hours was a survivor at sea, which is no nothing to laugh at. the this area of the world the solomon islands. there's a lot of sharks barracuda things that you don't necessarily want to be in the water with but it was actually the sounds of the battle that probably scared away the majority the sharks and the barracudas and things like that. this is one of the few instances where we have guys going in the water without instances of shark attacks things like that, especially a guadal canal so a scary moment indeed being a survivor at sea and getting you know having your ship shot out from underneath you and more importantly to him. he actually talks about in the interviews like i'm sitting there treading water and i'm thinking oh my god all my photographs are in the captain's locker. um and actually he was able to save one little small role which is where that photo was saved from but he he loses. all this and is a little side note national geographic in conjunction with paul allen if you guys remember the microsoft owner he had been doing. of work on the rv petrol going around the pacific to find rex of us warships from the pacific. he finds the vincennes in 2015 and one of the things they tried to do is actually take the captain's locker out restore the photographs, but they were too far gone, but they tried which is pretty neat. um, so he gets pulled off and during this whole incident. he actually contracts malaria and and i'm kind of going ahead. he's already actually taking this picture. so let me go back and tell the story of this. so ralph goes ashore one day and he has to be assigned on a combat patrol during the battle of guadal. canal. the marines were sending out combat patrols almost constantly and so he asked this second lieutenant. can i tag along with your guys? so he went out with a squad of about 12 guys with his walking through the jungle. and he's learning from these guys. they're telling him little tips on how not to get killed and hey, your photography equipment is a little shiny. you might want to put some dirt on it. so people don't see us, you know, so he's learning literally on the job. like, how do i not get these people killed? and so this picture was taken when the squad came to a cleared out area and there was a japanese tank that had been knocked out by artillery or something like that and they saw that this japanese skull had been put on this head had been put on the tank. and so i told i asked her alpha said how did you get this picture and in my mind? i'm thinking he went out there he set up his camera. it was like a neat little thing no danger and i was blown away by the story. he told me he said look. i looked at the second lieutenant and i said can i go out there and get that picture and the second lieutenant looked at me and said you can go by yourself. like i'm not going out there and one of the reasons for this the japanese were really good at -- traps and one of the things that our guys had begun to learn was if something looks like you're supposed to look at it or your attention is supposed to go towards it. it's probably something dangerous and so basically said look ralph i'll bet you dollars to donuts that you go out there and take that picture and you're gonna start getting shot at and ralph said, i'll take that bet and he ran out there and he took this photograph and under 20 seconds. that's what he told me said he ran out there sprinted took the photograph and ran back and the second he got back to the tree line that whole area started getting hit with mortar fire. so the second lieutenant was right, and he said that's when i really realized like i need to listen to these guys because they know what they're talking about. so it's a very neat story. but the photograph itself goes back to roosevelt's desk it sits on roosevelt's desk for like three months during this time period morse is dealing with the effects of malaria. he's already back stateside. hospital and he's in this hospital when he sees that they actually decided to run his photo roosevelt had to give permission to run this photo. it is considered to be the first wartime horror photo that was shown to the american public so you can imagine a big old life magazine cover seeing this picture show up in your mailbox. this is a big deal. got a lot of complaints. a lot of people did not like this photo. they thought it was too violent show too much the bad side of war etc, but at the end of the day, it was a photograph that sparked discussion and also brought home to americans the reality of the war, which i think up to that point judging by how the press had covered. the war was sort of i don't want to say misleading but they definitely shied away from showing some of the more graphic images. so this is a big deal again sat on roosevelt's desk for for a few months. all right. i just rambled there for a while. we got here. i gotta watch the time because i like talking. so after he recovers from malaria and sort of the the fame of this picture sort of wears off if you will he starts getting antsy for his next assignment and he is sent to europe which is neat. so all the way from the beginning of the war up into this point, he'd been been in the pacific now, he's on to europe and he does a lot of stuff in europe. he he basically captures patton's drive across france. he captures the the victory that the americans have in france. he captures some of the good moments and actually this is where americans start seeing the destruction in europe a lot with his photos. they start realizing like my god like this place is getting torn up pretty good, but it's the story of the man on the right. that is probably his most famous expose as a photographer and it's a really beautiful story just because you're ralph had actually gotten a lot of correspondence from people, you know parents of children. were serving he got a lot of correspondence a lot of thank yous from the parents of people who were serving overseas saying thank you for showing me the truth. thank you for showing me the things that you know, we didn't we didn't know about so in a way his photography was very helpful again to the the mothers and fathers who were stressing about their kids their son's who were still overseas so he comes up with this brilliant idea to basically go up to the front line in europe. and the second a soldier got wounded he was going to follow that soldier from the second that person was attended to by a field medic all the way back to the battalion aid station all the way back to the field hospital station all the way back to the general hospital and then all the way back to the united states and he did this he wanted to do this because he wanted to show the mothers the exact amount of care that their sons were receiving if they were wounded and that was a really beautiful concept and beautiful idea in 19445. so the story goes basically is he gets a sign um to this infantry division and he gets taken right up to the line and that morning the the american soldiers are in a little firefight with the germans and he said it wasn't five minutes after i got my camera set up where i looked over to the left and i saw a mortar blast and i saw a soldier get blown on his back. and he ran over and from that point on he was assigned to that soldier and so the man's name was george lott. and this is one of the first pictures that was taken of him at the general field hospital where they're able to x-ray it and get the cast on and things like that, but he ran about a 45 picture series in life magazine that showed the different phases of george lott and what it was like to be hit by a mortar round the very first picture that he took actually is of george lott laying in a little french farmhouse after he had just awoke from this unconscious, you know this event that made him unconscious and they just stuck some morphine in him. so he's got sort of a little smile on his face. you can tell he's feeling good and he's smoking a cigarette and so that was the first image and so from that image all the way on you saw sort of the progression of how he was cared for which is really sweet and that went all the way down to him getting into the united states and the whole story took about three four months to tell over three four months of life magazine. so the wounded man story is probably what he's most famous for or two even though the image on the left is probably the most visceral famous one that people don't forget. but you can still go on life magazine and type in wounded man, and you get the whole story. it's pretty neat. i definitely encourage you guys to go read it. it's really special so he he does this story it wraps up in about february of 1945 and he basically goes on to photographing the rest of the war in europe sort of all the way to the end. there's this famous image of eisenhower after he signs the ceremony. he's got the two pens and he holds him up in a v shape. that's ralph morse taking that picture. he was the civilian photographer selected to be present at the signing of the surrender and he was also the civilian photographer selected at at the nuremberg trial so a lot of those really kind of dark. i don't want to say mugshot but portrait photos of all of the yeah, they are mugshots the mugshots of all the nazi criminals. sorry. yeah, ralph morse took all that and so his work really carried on and he probably had he called this his best assignment of his career, but after the war and between his other duties, he basically lived with his wife for 10 years in paris, france documenting the reconstruction of europe. so again, he the american government through the marshall plan decides to spend all this money to basically, you know in a giant welfare project to rebuild europe. it's the first time after a major world war that the governments the culpable governments felt that they should assist and actually rebuilding the mess they created so he helps document a ton of that the rebuilding that's going on in france and especially in germany. and then this is another sort of segue point in his career where he goes on to do some really incredible things. um, he gets a job nasa in 1953. this is about four years really before the space race starts, but we have sort of this military civilian control of nasa. it's actually called naca at one point, but then it becomes nasa. and and more essentially is assigned to basically take photographs of everything that's happening with nasa. this includes the training of the astronauts the rocket launches the tests you name it. he's got this really beautiful photograph of this guy who has these lights projected on his face and the us navy or nasa. saria is trying to figure out how to build that the helmet for the astronauts. and so they wanted to shine light on their face and and map out all the contours of their faces. so they'd fit perfectly. so he's got this really weird series of photographs with all the astronauts and they're all in black and white with all these weird colors on their faces. so it's kind of neat. he really really gets in with the mercury program the mercury program along with the gemini and the apollo program is sort of goes in a sequence mercury was how do we get people into orbit? how do we get human beings like up into space? the gemini program was more about how do we land a human being on the moon? how do we you know, get the lunar rover? right and the stages of the rockets etc? that gemini programs really about how do we do everything but put a man on the moon and then the apollo program of course is let's put a man on the moon. so he's with the astronauts throughout this whole period john glenn famously called him the eighth astronaut he trained with them. he took all their all their photographs got to know their families got invited to christmas. dinner's you name it. he was sort of the guy with nasa and became more than a photographer to the astronauts again. i think they really earned a lot of his trust or he earned a lot of their trust by actually participating in some of the training with him. but what's cool is that you know, obviously nasa is dealing with rockets. it's dealing with jet pilots and people doing things that are brand new and in my mind, i think things that are very fast right like a rock. it's very fast and all these things that need to be captured with photography are very fast things, you know planes going by a 2000 miles an hour etc. so he develops all these different devices. he uses the budget of nasa to essentially create the devices that he needs to create in order to capture the specific photo that he wants. for example, i think i have the we'll go to the baseball. here's a second, but that's the famous picture of apollo 11 taking off on its way to the moon and obviously a human being couldn't stand all the way up on that tower with a rocket going by they'd be cooked by the the they'd be cooked by the rocket after it cleared that that top part so he had to design a special foot switch operated camera and a special camera device that would go up on top of this 37 story tall thing that held up the rocket and so he had to get all the permissions to climb up there to read the the camera you name it, but basically he went through about a mile of film in the device that captured this image. and this was the best one that came out of it. so all those really pretty images of the rocket going up with the paint shaking off and all of that that was captured by ralph morse. he gets a and we'll go back to some of the nasa stuff in a second, but he gets this really awesome opportunity and this is where sort of his personal probably this is probably the most personal assignment. he had the reason being is because ralph morse was jewish and jackie robinson was obviously black at a time when he was breaking through the color barrier and major league baseball. jackie was famously sort of suspicious of anyone who wanted to help him or be a part of his orbit. he kept a very tight-knit group with his friends and family if you've seen the movie 42, he obviously had distrust with like the white ownership the white coaches you name it. so this was for morris a really important thing for him and what actually allowed more to sort of get into jackie's orbit was jackie to great interest in the holocaust and so ralph was jewish and so that whole idea of being a part of two groups that were discriminated against that allowed them to sort of develop a bond. and so morse was the guy who was jackie robinson's personal biographer from a photography standpoint. i played baseball in college and so i was really excited to talk to ralph morris about this particular picture. this is one of hundreds of photos that exist from that moment where jackie robinson famously still home plate and the 1955 world series morris actually had to use a missile tracking camera and he did the same thing. he was basically out behind the third base dug out with a foot pedal camera, and it's really cool how he talks about because the night before he was at jackie's house and jackie told him. he said it's in the oral history interview. he says if i get on third base get your camera ready cuz i'm gonna do something special. so morris must have been like the only guy in the entire stadium that maybe had an inkling that he was going to try to do something and so he's like you could you could tell jackie had this way of whenever he let off he would be you know, he was like a i think they said like a a mouse that had his feet on fire. he would never sit still and he was always trying to trick out the pit the pitcher and so once he started dancing on third base morris described that the energy in the stadium started to grow people started to oh like what's going on you could like visibly hear everyone getting more interested and right when the pitcher delivered to home plate. he broke and stole home plate, which is a pretty awesome thing to do. i don't know how many people know baseball but stealing home place not exactly the easiest thing to do. it's a mind game. it's a mental trick and you on top of it. you have to be really fast. you can't be slow so he gets about to 200 images if you will from this awesome moment in 1955 the world series. one thing i glossed over i forgot about this in 19. 48 babe ruth has his last appearance in a yankee uniform and morse was selected to be the guy to photograph babe ruth. so there's this famous color image. he talks about why he chose to use color for it. he said no one else seemed to be using color and i just wanted to get a shot of babe ruth in color. i figured somebody might find that important later on down the road. so there's a great image of like babe ruth leaning on to his bat and he's kind of looking down and he looks like he's just beaten up and he's like done with his career and and there's just this great that more skits. of ruth doing that so that sort of sums up like his major sort of career moments. there's sort of three key areas in my mind when i think about ralph morris, i think of the world war two years i think of his baseball years with jackie robinson, and then i also think about his nasa years, but one thing that he did that in his interview he thought you know, geez these were probably the more some of the most boring photos i ever took but if you look at how they've been used in the future probably they were the most important photographs he ever took. if there was a doctor who was performing a brand new surgery or using a brand new piece of medical medical equipment at this time period it was really imperative that it was photographed whether it was the procedure itself whether it was an open heart surgery something like that, but morse was basically contracted by most major medical providers that made like equipment for surgeries, and so some of the first heart surgeries morse photographs some first brain surgeries that use these different types of techniques morse photographed so he's got some really interesting things and what i find fascinating about morrison. i wish i knew more about the technical side of it, but he almost never used the same camera for each shot. he if a camera didn't exist for the shot that he wanted. he built it himself, which is cool. you know, he went to nasa and said i'd like to photograph the rocket from the top of the tower and they're like if you go up there you're gonna die. okay. well, how can i make a camera that will actually with withstand the the heat of the rocket and actually, you know, not break and and take the picture. and so he ended up having a career with life magazine from 1942 to 1988. it was a long career of basically the only as he would say sort of big boy job he had but he loved it and i could tell when i went to interview him that his passion for photography was still there. i'll never forget going into his apartment in delray beach, florida in the first thing. i noticed as an oral historian was the lighting was awful. i was like my god like it's so dark and this guy's apartment and i got to set up this camera. like, how am i going to film it? and i told him that and it didn't really occur to me that i'm talking to this like photography legend, you know, and i'm like sir, like it's gonna be really like a dark thing like it's not gonna look good. he's like and he got up. he's like, let's see how we can fix that. and so i'll never forget. he asked me to grab like these three really thick books off his shelf and like stack them up and we move to chair around and he took this lamp that he had any removed the shade off of it and he put this little thing on the back of it and he moved it over. any kind of he's like 93. he's just like shuffling over and doing this and i just sat back and i was like, how cool is it that he's like setting up my shot like this is great and honestly it improved the shot. obviously. it did like i didn't have a way to light it and it was really sweet. not only was i there to capture his oral history, but he was also honored by the museum as a silver service medallion recipient we have our american spirit awards and we like to recognize world war two veterans that you know, not only recognize him for their service but maybe world war two veterans who did something extraordinary after their service and so we were honored in 2014 to give more this this award he passed away in 2014, so it wasn't too long after that. he actually passed away on december 7th the anniversary of pearl harbor, but we were lucky to have known him here at the museum lucky to have honored him while he was still alive and it's been really great, you know to have this opportunity to sort of highlight and hopefully i've just sort of open the crack of the door for you guys. to learn a lot more about ralph morse. um, famously one of the last owners of time magazine before it became life said that if they could only afford one photographer, it would be ralph morse which is very kind his career again spanning over 44 years. he won over 30 awards for photography. he was a recipient of the 1995 joseph sprague award, which is considered the highest honor in the field of photojournalism. and then in 2010, he was awarded the britain had in lifetime achievement award for his world war two photographs. obviously the man had a remarkable career and again, it's been an honor to sort of highlight to you guys sort of in a very small way each little piece of his career. so i guess without further ado are there any questions comments concerns? so for the q&a if you are watching in person just raise your hand. i will come to you if you are watching online. just type your comment as a type your question as a comment on book vimeo or youtube and we will get to that as well. so yes, tom. thank you very much for the presentation. i truly enjoyed it. it's the one yes, look at that. you said you collected the oral history from the photographer. how does one access that oral history? so i actually was a nervous about that when i went to go do this. i was like, i hope it's digitized world war two online ww2 online.org is the museum's digital collections website. it's annotated so it's not transcribed word for word. essentially. we do it in 10 minutes segments. so we've sort of we sort of summarize what the veteran talks about in that 10 minutes. it's usually about three or four paragraphs. it allows for sort of a quick read of it. but each interview that we have on there is is chopped up into these 10-minute segments. we assign key vocabulary terms to it. so it's easily searchable etc. but ww2 online.org again if you like world war two oral history you can get all you want on that website. if you ever clean your house, i like to to throw on an oral history when i'm cleaning my house something nice to have on the background so you can learn a lot there and as you go through the names you'll notice we have some pretty heavy hitters and and sort of the world war two history world some of the oral histories that we're taking, you know, 10 15 years ago people who are no longer with us. there's some really good stuff on there. for sure. i've had one more. was all his photography still photography. most of it was still but he did do some motion stuff mainly with nasa but during the war it was all still basically, he'd never had like a camera to record motion. yeah. so i have a question. did he save any of the cameras that he built? um, i know nasa has that the one that went on top of this was sort of taken by nasa. he most if he used a special camera for a shot like this, he would he would give the camera or at least leave the camera with that entity. so nasa basically with the budget that they had which allowed him to build all this stuff kept of it. yeah. well, it looks like that is all the questions that we have today for you tom. i do want to thank you for this wonderful presentation and also thank you for your many years of service here at the national world war two museum tom has been instrumental in so many things for those you guys who don't know him. he brought to life our air show. he that was his baby for years. he was an oral historian. he's worked very closely with our veteran and military groups in the new orleans and really across the united states to really make our veteran and military engagement efforts top class. so let's get tom round of applause. appreciate everyone. here