Dennis Stock, the man responsible for the Life magazine photo of James Dean in an overcoat and with a cigarette in his mouth while walking down rain-soaked Times Square, died Monday night at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla. Diagnosed with cancer, he contracted pneumonia a few days ago. Stock was 81.
According to the Los Angeles Times obit, Stock met Dean at a 1954 party hosted by Nicholas Ray, who would direct the actor in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
The Times Square photo was part of a photo essay published in Life in 1955, which ominously included an image of Dean posing inside a coffin in a funeral home casket showroom in Fairmount, Ind., where Dean had spent much of his time while growing up.
The 24-year-old actor would die in a car crash in Cholame, Calif., on Sept. 30, 1955. Dean received two posthumous Oscar nominations, for Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1955) and for George Stevens' Giant (1956).
"I liked him sometimes, but not all the time," Stock told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2005. "But he was like family after a while. We really bonded in Indiana. Not in New York, where he was distracted a lot. He was an insomniac and didn't get a lot of sleep and was a pain in the ass to work with."
Among other stars in the world of film and music that Stock photographed were Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.