RIP Howard Bingham (Muhammad Ali Photographer)

playmaker88 · December 2016

Might not know his name but you know his iconic photos

In 1962, Mr. Bingham was working for The Los Angeles Sentinel, an African-American newspaper, when he met Ali at a news conference to announce a coming fight. Mr. Bingham took a few shots of the brash, rising boxer and left.

But afterward he spotted Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, and his brother, Rudy, on a street corner.

“I asked them if they wanted a ride someplace because it looked like they were waiting for a bus, and they said no,” Mr. Bingham said in “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times” (1991), an oral biography by Thomas Hauser. “They were just watching the girls go by. So I asked if they’d like to take a ride with me.”

They joined Mr. Bingham on his errands and, he recalled, “we hit it off good.”

That encounter led to many more as Mr. Bingham balanced his time with Ali — up to 100 days a year, he estimated — with his work as a freelance photographer. His privileged access let him do more than other photographers assigned to cover Ali’s fights and training camps.

Mr. Bingham did not ignore the bouts, but his work was especially valuable for showing Ali away from the ring: preaching or sleeping; playing with his children or with Elvis Presley; posing with black leaders like Malcolm X and James Meredith.

“Ali never met a camera he didn’t like,” Jerry Izenberg, a longtime sports columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, said in an interview this week. “But by being there, in hotel rooms and on streets with Ali, Howard saw him in unguarded moments and put together a portfolio that reveals the man Ali really was. His legacy, his pictures, are a necessary piece of the Ali puzzle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/sports/howard-l-bingham-muhammad-alis-longtime-photographer-dies-at-77.html?rref=collection/byline/richard-sandomir&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection