Robert Halmi

Robert Halmi (Sr.) (Hungarian: Halmi Róbert; 1924–2014) was a Hungarian-born photographer for LIFE and other magazines. After 1974, with the decline in magazine photojournalism he became an Emmy Award-winning producer of movies and mini-series for television.

Robert Halmi was born in Budapest on 22 January 1924. His father, Béla Halmi, was a photographer and brought up his son after he divorced while Robert was young. He had photographic commissions with the Habsburg royal family and the Vatican. Consequently, Robert was familiar with photographic processes from an early age.

A freedom fighter for Hungary during the Second World War, Halmi was jailed by the Nazis. After the war, in 1946, he graduated in economics from the University of Budapest and, with his knowledge of English, got work assisting and translating for a Time-Life reporter in Budapest. He took up photography, freelancing for American newspapers, but this brought him under suspicion from the Communist government and was briefly jailed again. On release he worked for Radio Free Europe in Austria as a broadcaster. There, he photographed black-shrouded women mourners, a picture later selected by Edward Steichen for MoMA's world-touring The Family of Man exhibition.

Halmi went to the United States in 1950, arriving in New York, and after establishing himself as a commercial photographer he approached LIFE and other magazines, including Sports Illustrated, and was commissioned for adventure and travel stories, often participating in the events he would document, including an African road rally for a story “The Wildest Auto Ride on Earth”. For True magazine, he photographed Sam Snead and the Shah of Iran.

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