In a notable career shooting primarily for Life and Sports Illustrated, Bill Eppridge has covered wars, political campaigns, heroin addiction, the arrival of the Beatles in the United States, the summer and winter Olympics, and perhaps the most dramatic moment of his career–the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles.

His photography has won numerous awards and has appeared in traveling exhibits throughout the world. He has taught photojournalism at Yale University, the Missouri Photojournalism Workshop, Barnstorm: The Eddie Adams Workshop, Rich Clarkson’s Photography at the Summit, and Sportsshooter Workshop.

When his family lived in Richmond, Virginia at the end of WWII, a man with a pony came to the Eppridge household one day and offered his photographic services.

Bill Eppridge, who was about 10 at the time, got out his Brownie Starflash 620 camera and posed with it. “I started thinking, ‘this guy doesn’t have a bad job.

He gets to travel, meets some interesting people and he’s even got a pony.'” As a young boy, he waited for the mailman to deliver Life magazine every week, and always enjoyed the photographs by David Douglas Duncan, Robert Capa, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I was fascinated by this work and I felt that it affected the people who looked at these pictures.”

He was also moved by Joe Rosenthal’s image of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima. “Over the years, I thought there was some power with this medium. If you can do a couple of good things for people in your life, then you’ve lived a good life,” he remarks.

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To read more about Eppridge, continue the article at PhotoWorkshop.com.

Photo copyright 1964 Bill Eppridge. All rights reserved.