[Arthur Rosenfield, Tony’s Friend]:
“He’s a man who has a gift for seeing, seeing life at its best and its worst and capturing it so the rest of us can understand ourselves.”

[Tony Vaccaro, Photographer]:
“When I saw this picture, I was 20 yards away, and I looked and said what a picture! And I ran bang! And shot just like that.”

Tony Vaccaro was only 20-years-old when he took this picture, one of the best of his career. Here’s another, Italian actress Sophia Lauren.

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“With Sophia Lauren, I really wanted to capture a cover girl.”

And then there’s the artists, philosophers and inventors, all of whom Tony says were the best in their fields.

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“I’m interested in people who gave mankind something, who made us proud of what we are.”

Tony was born in the United States to Italian parents. It was Tony’s high school teacher who inspired him to pick up a camera.

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“And he looked at me with a smile in his face, and he said: 'why don’t you become a foreign correspondent', and he hesitated a little bit and I, wondering what is he going to say... 'photographer', and that little light lit bright on my head. I said this is it.”

In 1944 Tony was drafted in the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. He fought with a gun in one hand, and a camera in the other.

After war, Tony returned to America, edged his way into fashion photography, working for magazines like Life, Look and Time. Rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous came naturally.

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“It gave me entrée to any person I wanted to meet on earth, and that is wonderful.”

Tony’s photos give extraordinary insight into the minds of his subjects, an insight that’s not easy to capture.

[Arthur Rosenfield,Tony’s Friend]: 
“He’s curious, and that curiosity brings out a sense of humanity and life that you can only really see through his pictures.”

Though some may call it luck, Tony goes by the saying “luck prefers the man who searches for it."

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“When I first met Givenchy, he was so handsome, so dashing, and I said I got to capture this word, dashing. And I see him coming out and bang!”

And here’s Tony’s insight for budding photographers.

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“If you want good photographs you have to walk, walk, walk, and then you run into these kinds of things. In other words, if somebody says: 'oh come and visit me on my farm sometime', dont' say no! There may be other things to discover."

And that’s Tony Vaccaro.

[Tony Vaccaro]:
“Experimenting, what else can photography do?”

Kathryn Shakespear, NTD News, New York.