William Vandivert

William Vandivert (August 16, 1912 – December 1, 1989) was an American photographer, co-founder in 1947 of the agency Magnum Photos.

Vandivert was born in Evanston, Illinois.

He studied chemistry from 1928 to 1930 at Beloit College in Wisconsin, and then photography at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1930 to 1935.

From 1935, he became a photographer for the Chicago Herald Examiner.

Vandivert joined the Life magazine team in London in 1938.

He was one of the few photographers who were working in color photography before the Second World War.

Vandivert made color photo report in Paris in the summer of 1939.

He was using Kodachrome.

The following year he photographed in color the Blitz in London.

For Life in 1943 he was in India to produce a harrowing series on the Bengal Famine, with photographs of an elderly woman dying by the roadside, an old man’s ribs poking through his bare chest, truck sweepers cleaning corpses off the streets, and the starved dead being cremated in the street.

At Gardelegen concentration camp, Vandivert took photographs reproduced in the May 7, 1945, issue of Life that show in detail the remains of hundreds of political prisoners who were locked in a warehouse when the German camp guards set it on fire; an atrocity discovered by Allied troops arriving on April 14, two days later.

Printed quarter-page size, some show corpses that are still smouldering, while one picture filling page 35 illustrates an overview from inside the warehouse and the enormity of the atrocity.

In 1945 just after the Battle of Berlin, Vandivert was the first Western photojournalist to photograph the city's ruins and Adolf Hitler's bunker, which were published by Life in July 1945.

Vandivert left Life 's editorial team in 1946.

Along with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and Maria Eisner, he helped found Magnum Photos in 1947.

His wife, Rita Vandivert, presided over the cooperative and managed the New York office at its opening

Vandivert and his wife left Magnum Photos in 1948.

He continued his career as a freelance photographer, publishing numerous reports in Fortune magazine and then devoted himself with his wife to documentary photography on nature and animals.

One of the series, captioned Terribly concentrated on food, child stuffs self at Ramkrishna Mission Ashram near Calcutta was chosen in 1955 by curator Edward Steichen for the section 'Famine' in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, that was seen by 9 million visitors.

He covered the Second World War in various theatres of European operations.

They published several books together between 1960 and 1982.

Vandivert died on December 1, 1989, at the age of 77.

Vandivert's photographs were included in these exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York;

Vandivert's work is held in the following public collections: