Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Tuesday, May 08, 2007 at 10:53:23 :
Marin Independent Journal
Friday, January 28, 1994
Section B, page 2
Photographer Gordon Peters, 71
Photographer Gordon Peters of San Anselmo, whose pictures in the San Francisco Chronicle helped to illustrate the changing American scene in the 1950s and ‘60s, has died of pneumonia.
He was 71.
Services are planned for Monday.
Mr. Peters, formerly the Chronicle’s chief photographer and a member of the staff for 37 years, died Wednesday at Marin General Hospital, said his wife, Norma Peters.
“Gordon Peters was not only a fine photographer, he was also a pioneer in his profession,” Chronicle Editor William German said. “He served the Chronicle admirably as the bridge between the era of the press-card-in=the-hat cameramen and the modern practice of photojournalism.”
Mrs. Peters said her husband was proudest of his work in helping to organize a critically acclaimed exhibition of Chronicle photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called “…A Thousand Words.”
“I think that was really his crowning glory, not because of his own photographs in the exhibition but because he was very proud of the whole concept behind it,” Mrs. Peters said.
Putting together the 1977 exhibition required an exhaustive review of the Chronicle’s photography archives. Among the pictures featured were Mr. Peters’ prize-winning of a 1956 helicopter crash at the Ferry Building, with an unknowing bystander smiling in the foreground.
His 1968 photo capturing a glowering San Francisco State president S. I. Hayakawa moments after Hayakawa pulled the plug on a student microphone during a campus demonstration epitomized the decade’s clash of generations.
A 1957 portrait of a woman lounging on the windowsill of her North Beach apartment evoked the emerging beatnik era.
A native of San Francisco, Mr. Peters attended San Francisco State and worked at the San Francisco Examiner as a copy boy.
Upon his return to San Francisco, he worked as a library assistant for the Examiner and a camera repairman before joining the photo staff of the Chronicle in 1950. He became chief photographer in 1970 and retired in 1987.
Besides his wife of 50 years, Mr. Peters is survived by a son Donald Peters, also of San Anselmo, and daughter Linda Ball of Livermore.
A memorial service begins at 1 p.m. Monday at chapel of the Hills, 330 Red Hill Ave., San Anselmo.
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