Heart Failure Kills Photographer

George Silk, a photojournalist who spent 30 years with Life magazine, earning fame for his coverage of World War II and later pioneering the use of a special camera for depicting athletes in motion, has died. He was 87.

Silk died at a Norwalk, Conn., hospital on Saturday of congestive heart failure, family members said Monday.

Silk, born in New Zealand on Nov. 17, 1916, joined Life's photo staff in 1943 and spent the next two years covering the war on the Italian front, the Allied invasions of France and the Pacific. He shot the first pictures of the atom-bombed city of Nagasaki and Japanese war criminals awaiting trial in postwar Tokyo.

He became an American citizen in 1947, the same year he married the former Margery Gray Schieber. They lived in Westport, Conn.

Silk was "superbly versatile" and was at ease with every subject, said Bobbi Baker Burrows, a senior Life photo editor.

"He also was lovably cantankerous, a larger than life character who would break into `Waltzing Matilda' at the slightest excuse," Burrows said.

In December 1972, he was in Nepal, shooting an assignment on Himalayan game parks when he received news that the magazine had folded. According to the 1977 book "That Was the Life," Silk replied by saying, "Your message ... badly garbled. Please send one-half million dollars additional expenses."

"He was very innovative and creative," his wife said in a phone interview Monday, recalling how Silk had adapted a racetrack photo-finish camera to take sequential stills of hurdlers and other athletes for the 1960 Olympic trials and used it for other purposes - including a famous series of his own children in Halloween costumes.

The "strip" camera, in which film was exposed as it rolled past a hole, helped Silk become a leading sports photographer.

Silk's career as a war photographer began in 1939 as a combat cameraman for the Australian government, covering action in the Middle East, North Africa and Greece. Trapped with the famed Desert Rats at Tobruk in Libya, he was captured by German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's forces but escaped 10 days later.

In New Guinea, he walked 300 miles with Australian forces, an ordeal later described in a book, "War in New Guinea." He was with American forces in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and was wounded by a grenade during a river crossing in Germany.

Silk was named magazine photographer of the year by the National Press Photographers Association four times.

Silk, whose death comes as Life magazine is making yet another attempt to revive itself, is survived by his wife, two daughters and a son. No memorial is planned.

By Richard Pyle