17. Göksin Sipahioglu the Photographer.

A little over a year ago Steve Jobs died, and we all saw a lot of people mentioning him in the media, via Facebook, etc. A very accomplished, inspiring, game changer that one. On the same day, here in Turkey, folks were remembering the one-year anniversary of the death of a daring, frontline photojournalist: Göksin Sipahioglu. He was a Turk who founded the Paris-based Sipa photo agency--which went on to become one of the most respected and most successful in the world.

Göksin Sipahioglu was born in Izmir, Turkey, in 1926. After attending the Lycée St. Joseph High School in Istanbul, he helped found the Kadiköy Sports Club (now best known for the Efes Pilsen basketball team). He later studied journalism at Istanbul University. 

During his career, initially for Turkish newspapers, Sipahioglu was one of the few "western" reporters or photographers in Havana during the 1962 missile crisis. With President Kennedy poised to take out Soviet missiles on Cuba, Havana was not high on the list of places to be for normal foreigners. But Sipahioglu stayed, and conveyed to the world much of the tension of the time--famously capturing a young, armed civilian girl protecting a Havana bank on behalf of her revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. That photo, and many of his other images of the crisis, appeared on the front pages of countless U.S. newspapers.



Then, in 1968, he was one of the photographers in between riot police, students, and other protesters in the streets of his adopted Paris. His photo of a well-dressed woman in high heels, pleading to riot police amid exploding tear gas canisters on the Place Mabillon, became one of the enduring images of the uprising. Another photo showed a female student sticking a flower in the hat of a wary policeman.

Sipahioglu was sent to Munich in 1972 to cover the Olympics and found himself visually chronicling the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes and its bloody outcome. His international recognition for those pictures led him to launch Sipa the following year along with his girlfriend, American journalist Phyllis Springer (whom he would marry almost 30 years later!).

     

Sipa Press, which still provides many of the photos we see in our papers, on TVs, and online every day, was one of three Paris-based agencies that dominated world photojournalism from the 70s until the digital revolution allowed freelancers to transmit and sell directly to media outlets. In the pre-digital days, photographers would send their rolls of film via international courier services--or sometimes by persuading or paying an airline passenger to "pigeon" their film to someone from their agency, who would pick them up at the arrival gate. Sounds very mysterious and glamorous, but in actuality was probably a pain in the rear to coordinate!

"Sipahioglu was the greatest photojournalist ever," the French photojournalist Jean-Francois Leroy told the British Journal of Photography. "He helped so many photographers ... giving them their first assignments. He had a unique position in this industry. He was a giant." In January 2007, then French president Jacques Chirac appointed him Knight of the Legion of Honour.

During his life in Paris, Sipahioglu was dubbed "le Grand Turc" by the French media. He launched or accelerated the careers of some of the greatest photojournalists and war photographers of our time, including the Iranians Abbas Attar and Reza Deghati and the Frenchmen Luc Delahaye and Patrick Chauvel. "He managed Sipa as a father," the agency said when they announced his death.

What a wonderful legacy. xx