Photo: A 1957 side-loading Cadillac hearse listed on EBay, with bids starting at $15,900 (there is a reserve).
Queen of the Dead – dateline March 12, 2012
• Photographer Stan Stearns (who died on March 2, age 76) will always be known for one shot: little John-John saluting his father’s coffin at his November 25, 1963, funeral. Stearns was a UPI photog during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years, also making a good living doing weddings, portraits, ads and (according to his website) “glamour and boudoir” photos. After snapping his shot of a lifetime, wrote Matt Flegenheimer in the New York Times, “he ignored orders to go to Arlington National Cemetery and instead walked the film to the UPI bureau himself, convinced he had secured the day’s indelible image.” Which leads me to one of my more startling tattoo sightings in New York, in the 1980s: a young man at an ATM, with a photorealistic tattoo on his arm of little John-John saluting the coffin. Mind you, this was New York, in the ’80s, so there is every chance that at some point, John F. Kennedy Jr., ran into this human canvas and saw himself, as a child, at his father’s funeral, on a total stranger’s arm.
The photos are Adams in his documentary mode and are not like the bravura images of Half Dome for which he is famous. The pictures document workers leaving the Lockheed plant and people’s daily lives in a trailer park.
ladailymirror.com 