Neal Boenzi, a photographer who spent more than 40 years at The New York Times deftly capturing aspects of urban life, from firefighters fleeing a falling wall to a man walking a goose, died Monday at a retirement home in Newhall, California. 97.
His daughter, Jeanette Boenzi, confirmed the death.
Mr. Boenzi’s photos were usually accompanied by the latest news items and longer articles. But they also contain many so-called daytime photos: photos he took when he was told to be creative and find photos that brightened readers’ days.
“There’s an aspect of Weegee in his photos, that New York grit, but with a lighter touch, less macabre,” said Fred Ritchin, dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography, in a telephone interview, referring to the celebrated New Yorker. York photography. City tabloid photographer of the 30s and 40s. “Maybe even a New York version of the humanism that you see in the work of French photographers like Robert Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson.”
In July 1962, Mr. Boenzi (pronounced boo-AND-zee) left a Manhattan steakhouse to hurry to the Bronx, where a five-alarm fire was raging through two abandoned buildings. He found a perch on a nearby roof from which he took a picture of the falling wall, five firefighters who looked like they were about to run, and a sixth who had begun to run. It added drama to The Times’ short, bald report of the fire.
“When something like this happens in front of you, you’re aware of what’s going on,” he told The Times in a 2013 video, “but the main thing is ‘get the attention – did I get it?'”
He would keep finding moments. He made a famous hug between Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister of Cuba, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev when they visited the United Nations in 1960. From a high floor of the Empire State Building, looking south, he took a front-page photo that showed smog eerily enveloping Manhattan on Thanksgiving morning in 1966, one of the city’s worst air pollution days.
He caught a woman who worked for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker protesting in 1956 the seizure of the archives of a Treasury Department agent. the South Bronx in the 1970s.
Mr. Boenzi was present when a lion was persuaded with sticks to leave its cage and pose with a model during a press preview of the 1966 International Auto Show at the New York Coliseum. The lion posed calmly at first, then suddenly sank its teeth into the model’s left thigh; she was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery, which saved her leg. One of Mr. Boenzi’s photos showed a handler trying to pry the lion’s mouth from the model’s thigh.
“If you asked Neal how he got the great shots he took, he would pretend to click an imaginary camera shutter with his index finger and say, ‘This isn’t it,'” David W. Dunlap, a reporter for The Times, and Librado Romero, a photographer for the paper, wrote in The Times’ Lens photography blog in 2010. “Then he tapped his temple with the same finger. ‘It’s this.'”
Neal Boenzi was born on November 15, 1925, in Brooklyn, one of five children. His father, John, was a plumber. His mother, Josephine (Sabbia) Boenzi, was a housewife. He enrolled at Brooklyn College but left early to enlist in the Marines, serving as an aviation mechanic from 1942 to 1945.
At first he did not think about becoming a photographer. But after his firing, a friend told him that The Times was looking for an office boy in the photography department for $30 a week. He was hired in 1946. He soon became a photo lab assistant and soon after began taking photographs.
He returned to active duty in 1950 for about a year during the Korean War, spending part of it in the photographic division of the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, NC. Shortly after his service ended, he was hired by The Times as a staff photographer.
Mr. Boenzi had a reputation for being very frugal; he was able to cover an entire job with a single roll of 36 exposures.
“He could get something in six frames,” Nancy Lee, one of his editors, told Lens in 2013. need.’ Sure enough, it would have six frames and five would be usable.
Some of his best photos were shown in an exhibit, “Vintage Boenzi,” at Manhattan’s Jadite Galleries in 2013. “He had a great eye,” Roland Sainz, Jadite’s owner, said in a phone interview. “He could catch things that a lot of other people might have missed.”
Mr Boenzi’s marriage to Lenore Rothstein ended in divorce. His second wife, Olga Marron, died in 1988. His third marriage, to Janina Sidorowicz, also ended in divorce. Survivors include his daughter.
Mr. Boenzi, who retired in 1991, found many of his subjects on the streets of New York City: a young black boy standing on a wrought-iron fence trying to balance; a construction worker beating up an opponent of the Vietnam War; people crying on Veterans Day; a dozen Radio City Rockettes (and a man) sunbathe on what appears to be a rooftop.
“Anyone can take a picture,” Mr. Boenzi liked to say, as Mr. Romero recalled in a second Lens post in 2010, “but are you a journalist?”
