Grey Villet
South African photographer
Grey Villet (1927–2000) was an American photojournalist of South African origin. He was "Magazine Photographer of the Year" in the United States in 1956. Employed by Life, his notable work included photographs of the Cuban Revolution at the end of 1958, and of Mildred and Richard Loving, who successfully challenged the State of Virginia’s law against interracial marriage in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Early life
Charles De Gouret Villet was born on 16 August 1927 in Beaufort West, in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The family later moved to Cape Town where his father, who was a doctor, persuaded Villet to study medicine at the University of Cape Town. However, he discovered a passion for photography and convinced his father to let him move to England to train as a photographer. Initially working as a wedding photographer outside a Civil Registry, he obtained a job with the Bristol Evening Post and then moved to London to work for Reuters. Returning to South Africa at the age of 24 he was employed by The Star of Johannesburg, but resigned following criticisms from management about his disheveled appearance.
Life magazine
After resigning from The Star, Villet moved to New York City, where he applied to Life magazine in 1954. Sent on a test assignment by the magazine's picture editor, he produced a photograph of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue taken from the 55th floor of a skyscraper, in which his feet, hanging over a ledge, appear in the foreground.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grey Villet” 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.