Helen Marcus, prolific celebrity photographer, dies at 97

Helen Marcus, a late-blooming photographer whose evocative black-and-white portraits of literary figures and film and television personalities graced book and magazine covers for decades, died Oct. 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her death was confirmed by her sister, Irene Feuerstein.

Ms. Marcus’s photographs were distributed in a wide variety of locations. Some were featured in annual company reports, and one was the model for an etching on a Swedish postage stamp honoring Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. She also became a champion of her fellow professionals.

Her fame as a photographer and her leading role as an advocate for her profession in matters of copyright and creditworthiness were all the more remarkable because the field was so overwhelmingly male-dominated at the time.

Ms. Marcus founded the New York chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (later the American Society of Media Photographers) in 1982 and served as its national president from 1985 to 1990. From 1998 to 2007 she was president of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fundan organization named after the celebrated photojournalist, founded in 1979 to help independent photographers complete their projects.

In response to a profile in The New York Times that credited George Lois, the Madison Avenue art director, with designing striking covers for Esquire magazine, Ms. Marcus complained in a letter to the editor in 2008 that the article featured Carl Fischer insufficiently recognised. , the photographer whose images appeared in many of those designs.

“It’s like publishing photos of the Sistine Chapel and mentioning the Pope who paid for them,” she wrote, “but not the painter.”

Helen Mae Marcus was born on October 28, 1925 in Manhattan. Her mother, Augusta (Hittleman) Marcus, an immigrant from Russia, was a housewife. Her father, Joseph, owned several shoe stores.

She graduated from A. B. Davis High School in Mount Vernon, NY, and received a bachelor’s degree in theater and economics from Smith College in 1946.

In addition to her sister, she is survived by a brother, Carl. Another brother, Bernard, died before her.

After working with theater director Hal Prince, Ms. Marcus was an associate producer and producer from 1955 to 1974 at Goodson-Todman Productions, the company that developed popular television game shows such as “To Tell the Truth” and “What’s My Line?” ”

“Her hobby was photography, and she became so skilled that she eventually left television for a career as a professional,” wrote Ira Skutch, a director who shared an office with Ms. Marcus at Goodson-Todman, in “I Remember Television: A Memoir ” (1989).

Once Ms. Marcus became a full-time photographer, her work appeared in Time, Forbes, Gourmet and other magazines, and in The New York Times. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the International Center of Photography.

She was one of the first Americans invited to China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s. She has taught at the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Ms. Marcus, who studied with Philippe Halsman, a Life magazine photographer, became known, like him, for her vivid portraits. Among her subjects were authors Mary Higgins Clark, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe; the actors Kitty Carlisle and Cliff Robertson; and talk show host Merv Griffin.

In 1977, Toni Morrison was said to be dissatisfied with the author’s photo on the cover of one of her early books and sought another photographer for her next book. Her publisher’s publicist brought in Ms. Marcus, who invited Ms. Morrison to her spacious apartment and shot four rolls of film of the author sitting at the dining room table.

When Ms. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and Swedish postal officials decided to honor her with a stamp, she suggested they contact Ms. Marcus. Her photo inspired an etchingwhich was on the stamp (with credit to Mrs. Marcus).

“It’s probably the most reproduced photo I’ve ever taken,” Ms. Marcus said in an interview with New letters magazine from 2007.

She offered a different kind of superlative for the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, whom she photographed in his apartment above Carnegie Hall. During that session, she said, “she felt real vibrations coming from him, exchanging more with you than anyone I’ve ever experienced.”

He was, Ms. Marcus added, “probably the sexiest person I have ever photographed.”