David Myers (cinematographer)
American cinematographer (1914-2004)
David Myers (May 8, 1914, Auburn, New York–August 26, 2004, Mill Valley, California, USA) was an American photographer and cinematographer known for his documentaries on popular music and musicians.
Photographer
Myers was born on May 8, 1914, in Auburn, New York. When he was 15, the New York Times paid him $15 for a shot of a fire in Greenwich. After being inspired by photographer Walker Evans' work at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1938, David also worked for the Farm Security Administration while studying at Antioch College. His FSA pictures were included in Just Before the War, an exhibition in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress shown on the Gallery of the Main Library February 14–March 30, 1969.
During World War II, a conscientious objector, Myers was conscripted to the U.S. Forest Service and photographed patients of a mental hospital in Spokane, Washington. After the war, he attended the California School of Fine Arts which was then staffed by Ansel Adams, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, and Edward Weston. His gritty portrait of a heavily laden and exhausted farm boy was featured in Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition The Family of Man for the Museum of Modern Art and was graced by 9 million visitors worldwide.
Cinematographer and director
In 1957, he directed a documentary film Ansel Adams, Photographer, written by Nancy Newhall and narrated by Beaumont Newhall. He then directed the documentary short Ask Me, Don't Tell Me (1961) with the support of photographer Imogen Cunningham, and continued his career shooting documentaries for both National Geographic and the United Nations through the 1960s, requiring much international travel.
“David Myers (cinematographer)” enters the record as american cinematographer (1914-2004). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Myers and cinematographer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q34627511. VIAF identifies the subject as 103338327. The Library of Congress control number is no2011114947. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2004, 1938 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Myers (cinematographer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.