When the photographer Douglas Kirkland died, in October 2022, he left behind a legacy of kindness and romance. Anyone who crossed his path can attest to the former, and Françoise, Doug’s mate of 56 years, volunteers passionate memories unprompted in support of the latter. His photographs remain a shimmering testament to both qualities.
Even among artists, who often become more absorbed with the characters in their field of endeavor than with their own families, Doug was exceptional. He formed a tribe of his colleagues and comrades, defined by goodwill and generosity. In the rough-and-tumble, acutely territorial, and occasionally backstabbing world of photographic journalism, Doug stood apart for his intelligent curiosity, instant understanding, and empathy.
I first attributed Doug’s lovely demeanor to his being Canadian. As a young New Yorker, I held a romantic ideal of Canada as a trouble-free United States, where people were somehow more civilized—a land of pine trees and canoes, with a peaceful, colonial order. Men were fleeing there to avoid the draft, so in my mind it was a sort of haven. From the small town of Fort Erie, Doug appeared as a Capra-esque character, an angelic emissary sent down from the north country. If his friend and contemporary Slim Aarons evoked Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (the set for which was copied from Slim’s own apartment), Doug was the Jimmy Stewart of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Tall and fair with transfixing pale-blue eyes and a winning smile, Doug cut an impressive figure but never came off as foreboding. He had a way of making you feel as if he were discovering something refreshingly new in you. Subjects instinctively trusted him, and it shows in his photographs. To Doug, you weren’t special because you were a movie star—though he photographed the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, and Jack Nicholson—you were special because you were you. And this premise works particularly well with movie stars.
Doug’s love story with Françoise—his beautiful, eternally 22-year-old French wife—endures even after his death. As she tells it, “We met in December 1965 on the set of How to Steal a Million in the Bois de Boulogne, a love at first encounter. Doug took me to Lapérouse [the Parisian restaurant known for its ‘private’ dining rooms]. I called my boyfriend the next day to say, ‘C’est fini.’”
Françoise continues, “I ran the show and created his playground. I still feel loved, admired, and appreciated. We had a marvelous and sexy rapport. Not competitive. We won together, and I never had a back seat. Doug had what I find attractive in a man, what one can’t touch: conviction and integrity, and I am happy to be Françoise Kirkland.”
Doug and Françoise first lived in New York, where their friendship with photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont and his wife, Eliane, proved seminal and lifelong. The Laffonts soon founded Sygma Photo News Agency, which soared in competition with Gamma, Magnum Photos, Contact, and Sipa Press. It was an era of the great French press agencies vying for sales in a huge market for editorial photographs. Françoise would become Sygma’s Los Angeles representative, making inroads into the movie business that helped Doug.
But to fully understand Doug’s career, you must have some knowledge of the state of the magazine business during his early years. Which is to say, it was in a period of peril that has only lately been outdone.
Doug’s generation witnessed the demise of Life and its head-on competitor, Look. Both were great, expensively produced “picture magazines” (meaning photographs) that for decades captivated America’s attention—at its height, Look had a print circulation of more than seven million copies. And though there were captions and short contextual stories, make no mistake, glorious photos printed at full-page bleed told the stories. Photographers were stars in their own right: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Harry Benson, Philippe Halsman, Aarons, Charlotte Brooks, and Paul Fusco among them.
Doug was a principal Look photographer, and even with the counsel of his mentor, the Life photographer Gordon Parks, he struggled to navigate the years of the sinking behemoths.
Ultimately, he and Françoise headed west to Hollywood to build a new life. They had made some documentary films together, and Doug had a few scripts under his arm that he envisioned directing himself. However, he quickly found schmoozing and letting studio bigwigs win at tennis humiliating when he was at the top of his game as a photographer.
In a stroke of good luck, as magazine budgets went down, there was an uptick in “special stills” unit photography on film sets. This was the long-standing tradition of studios and production companies commissioning photographers to take portraits behind the scenes—stills lifted from the film itself were often of quality too poor to be useful. It was a well-paid, privileged job, and ace photographers including Aarons, Bob Willoughby, and even Weegee took on this work, much in the same way writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald held screenwriting jobs. Doug excelled at it, taking photographs on the sets of films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Titanic, The Sound of Music, and Out of Africa.
He kept a hand in the editorial world all the while, servicing magazines with his Hollywood photographs while accepting assignments directly from Time, People, and, most dearly, Town & Country, where he had a strong rapport with its editor, Frank Zachary.
To the public, truly great magazine editors often appear the way a fancy conductor might. They flail madly and with an air of ridiculous frustration, silly little stick in hand, and you wonder what good they could possibly be doing—even the orchestra seems only occasionally to take notice. But remove him from the equation and you’ve got complete and utter cacophony. Such a man was Zachary.
The scene of a regular lunch at Gallaghers Steakhouse centered on Zachary and the photographers whose work he not only kept alive but helped to flourish, first at Holiday magazine in the 1960s and then at Town & Country in the 70s and 80s: Aarons; Tom Hollyman, whose one tender, matchless foray into cinematography was Lord of the Flies; Arnold Newman; John Lewis Stage; and Norman “Parks” Parkinson. These lunches were all about loyalty to Frank, and Doug regularly flew in, arranging them in later years as the participants aged.
This is how I came to know Doug: through Frank. As good as it gets. He reciprocated Frank’s loyalty, and with Frank’s daughter Amy he orchestrated Frank’s 93rd-birthday party—he also flew cross-country for Frank’s 100-year celebration. Amy Zachary recalls of Doug, “He was true blue. A fan and friend to my father, integrity till the end.” Truly, such unforgettable kindness gives legend to a bygone camaraderie in the editorial world that Douglas Kirkland embodied.
Jonathan Becker is a New York–based photographer
