Tony Vaccaro

Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro (born December 20, 1922), better known as Tony Vaccaro or Michael A. Vaccaro, is an American photographer who is best known for his photos taken in Europe during 1944 and 1945 and in Germany immediately after World War II. After the war, he became a renowned fashion and lifestyle photographer for U.S. magazines.

Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, as the second child of three (and the only boy) of his parents, who were Italian immigrants, he was baptized Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro. His father Giuseppe Antonio Vaccaro (b. October 14, 1874) was from Bonefro in the region of Molise in Italy. In 1926, the family moved back to Bonefro, where Tony spent his youth.

With the outbreak of World War II, Vaccaro moved back to the United States in order to escape the Fascist regime and military service in Italy. In the U.S., the seventeen-years old Vaccaro finished his education the high school in New Rochelle, New York. In 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Europe in 1944.

Vaccaro fought in 1944 and 1945 as a private in the 83rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in Normandy and then in Luxembourg and Germany. His task as a scout left him with enough free time during the day to take photographs. By the end of the war in Europe, Vaccaro had become an official photographer for the division's newspaper. In September 1945, he was discharged from the army. Vaccaro stayed in Germany, where he obtained a job first as a photographer for Audio Visual Aids (AVA) stationed at Frankfurt, and then with Weekend, the Sunday supplement of the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. Until 1949, Vaccaro photographed throughout Germany and Europe, documenting post-war life.

After his return to the U.S. in 1949, he worked for Flair and Look before joining the magazine Life. Photographs from his extensive (despite some 4,000 pictures having been lost in an accident in 1948) wartime archive were published in 2001 in his book Entering Germany: Photographs 1944-1949 and 2002 in the book "Shots of War - Tony Vaccaro". In 1994, he was awarded the French Légion d'honneur at the celebrations of the fifty-year anniversary of the Normandy landings. In 2002 German public television (ARD) showed the film "Schnappschüsse vom Krieg" (Shots of War). In 2004 Vaccaro received the German "Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse" and in the Parlement de la Bretagne his exhibition "Shots of War" was shown for the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of France. This exhibition was also shown at the "Scuderie del Quirinale" in Rome in 2009 and at the MEMORIAL in Caen in 2014. A museum named after Tony Vaccaro was inaugurated in Bonefro (CB) August 24, 2014.

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