Jerry Dantzic
1925 - 2006
Archive contact: Grayson Dantzic (graysongalaxy@aol.com)
Jerry Dantzic (American, b. June 3, 1925 - d. December 14, 2006) was born to Rose and Albert Dantzic of England, in Baltimore, Maryland. He moved with his parents and sister, Anita to the Bronx when he was six years old. He graduated from Evander Childs High School in 1942.
He served during World War II as a combat infantryman with the US Army's 30th Division of Ohio and then as a reporter for the Stars and Stripes. He attended Kent State University on the GI Bill, where he earned his pilot's license, graduating in 1949 with a B.A. in journalism and English.
From 1951 Jerry worked in New York as publicity writer by day and took night courses at Columbia University. Joining the Columbia Camera Club, he shared a darkroom with Garry Winogrand, George Zimbel, and other aspiring photographers. In 1953, inspired by the Alexey Brodovitch Workshop he had attended, he quit his job and went to Mexico for two months. In a letter at that time, he wrote, "For better or worse I have taken the plunge as a photojournalist."
He returned to New York to pursue work as a freelancer, encouraged by Winogrand. A member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers since 1956, he worked for numerous publications of the day including, among others, Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, Look and Life. In 1958 he moved to Manhattan, opening a studio on West 31st Street, and married Cynthia Mans Gross.
While continuing to work as a photojournalist in the 1970s and 1980s, Jerry Dantzic developed a unique specialty, panoramic photography using the Cirkut camera with image capability up to and beyond 360 degrees. Assisted by his wife and young son, Dantzic traveled to all fifty states and abroad for eight summers to pursue his monumental project. His pioneering color panoramic work won him two Guggenheim Fellowships and a solo exhibition in 1978 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by John Szarkowski.
He spent more than twenty-five years as an educator, teaching at Long Island University and at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and lecturing at many other institutions. Jerry Dantzic's photographs are in the permanent collections of The Chase Manhattan Bank, International Center of Photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, Smithsonian Institution and Whitney Museum of American Art.
He dedicated the historic 2002 survey of his early work, the book Jerry Dantzic's New York: The Fifties in Focus, "To my wife, Cynthia, the love of my life, my finest engine, providing me with the energy to do the kind of thing I have been doing for the past forty-five years. And to my son Grayson, my devoted chef de guerre, the maker of things for me, and to whom I am eternally grateful."