 Fred
Maroon (1924
- 2001) Ghanem
Maroon (Father of Fred) left his village of Jouwwar el Joz in 1910,
and headed for the New Jersey United States. Ghanem Maroon began
his life in the States as a traveling salesman and later opened
his own clothing shop. He married Sophie Boueri, also Lebanese and
whose family came from the village of Mount Lebanon Bouar. Their
only son Fred was born in 1924.
Fred Maroon
was born in New Brunswick, N.J. After three years in the Navy during
World War II, he attended the Catholic University of America, in
Washington, D.C., receiving a Bachelor of Architecture degree in
1950. He completed his studies with one year of graduate work at
the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1996
he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Humane Letters) from Catholic
University.
After graduation
Maroon worked for Life magazine in New York, and became a stringer
in their Paris bureau while doing his graduate studies. Following
that he practiced architecture for two and a half years. In 1953
Edward Steichen selected a number of his photographs to include
in the exhibition "Always the Young Strangers," at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Inspired by this, in 1954 Mr.
Maroon became a freelance photographer. During his career Fred Maroon
had scores of photographic features in most major national and international
magazines, including National Geographic, Smithsonian, Paris Match,
Town and Country, Travel and Leisure, Esquire, Life, Look, and Holiday.
Fred Maroon
was the recipient of Gold Medal awards from the Art Directors' Clubs
of Metropolitan Washington and New York. His work was exhibited
throughout America and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and the National
Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress, in Washington DC. He
had one-man exhibitions
at the Corcoran Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, and the United
States Capitol in Washington DC. In June 1995 he had an exhibition,
"Politics and Poetry," at the Leica Gallery in New York.
A posthumous exhibition, "Sorrow and Splendor: Images of Europe,
1950 - 1951," was held at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery in Washington,
DC in 2002. His photographs have
been exhibited in major national museums as part of the "Photography
in the Fine Arts" exhibitions, which are now in the permanent
collection of the International Center of Photography in New York.
Among his many honors were four First Prize awards in the annual
White House News Photographers' Association competitions.
Fred Maroon
lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. In
1986 and 1990 he exhibited and lectured at Photokina in Cologne,
Germany, and in October 1986 he lectured as part of the National
Geographic Society's "Masters of Photography" series.
In 1990 Maroon was part of the Smithsonian Institution's "Masters
of Photography" series.
Art and press
photographer Fred Maroon was the official photographer of Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson and accompanied Richard Nixon during his election
campaign for the Presidency. His photographs have been shown in
galleries and museums across the United States and his most famous
exhibition, based on his book The Nixon Years, was held at the Smithsonian
National Museum of American History.
During Lyndon Johnson's
presidency, he was a regular contributor to American magazine articles
on the White House and averaged over a hundred photographs published
each year. President Richard Nixon was much less interested in courting
the media than his predecessors had been and articles on the White
House were few and far between. But Herb Klein, the president's
director of communications, suggested producing a book with the
author Allen Drury on the Nixon presidency, its protagonists and
work practices. Fred agreed to the project on condition that the
White House would have no control over the content and photographs,
and the book appeared in 1971.
In 1972, he was given
the authorization to photograph Nixon's re-election. He offered
the photographs to Life and they were published in a four-page spread.
He started his shoot barely a week after Watergate broke and, as
no-one thought to stop him; he was able to record the whole story,
including Nixon's resignation on the 8th August 1974. His photographs
appeared in all the American press.
A year after Nixon's
resignation, a showing of his photographs during a conference at
the University of Philadelphia, elicited such a violent reaction
from students that Maroon decided to hide his 576 rolls of negatives.
The only resurfaced some twenty years later with the publication
in 1999 of the Nixon Years 1969-1974; White House to Watergate (text
by Tom Wicker), a book he dedicated to his four children. The photographs
were exhibited at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
between July and December 1999.
He continued taking photographs
at the White House, the last series being of the Clintons' Christmases
there, though he never again spent so much time focusing on an individual
the way he had done with Nixon.
After Watergate, he took
his family on photographic journey across America, capturing the
natural beauty of the country. The result of this trip was These
United States, published in 1975 with text by Hugh Sidey.
Maroon always saw his
Nixon project as being the most important of his professional life
and remained grateful to the disgraced president for having allowed
him access to the White House and Oval Office for a whole nine months
after the scandal broke. In his words, Nixon always had "his
eye on History."
Fred Maroon
visited Lebanon and his family village of Jouwwar el Joz in 1951
and 1967 and recorded his impressions of the country in a lovely
series of photographs. He died in November 2001, having borne photographic
witness to a turbulent time in the history of the United States.
In 1977 he received a royal commission to make portraits of the
ruling members of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh, and in 1978
he was commissioned by the Egyptian Government to make President
Sadat's official portrait.
Fred Maroon
was visiting Professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School
of Public Communications for the winter/spring semester of 1984.
In 1985 he received the Newhouse Citation from Syracuse University
for his significant contribution to the field of visual communications.
Fred Maroon
was the author of twelve books. His first two books, Washington:
Magnificent Capital (with Eric Sevareid and A. Robert Smith) and
Courage and Hesitation (with Allen Drury), were published by Doubleday
& Company. An exhibition of photographs from Washington: Magnificent
Capital was held in Washington in 1965, and the United States Information
Agency accepted the exhibition for display in major museums throughout
the world.
Fred co-authored
his third book, These United States, with Hugh Sidey. It was published
in English by EPM Publications, Inc., of McLean, Virginia, and in
German, Swedish and Italian by Reich Verlag, of Lucerne, Switzerland.
Photographs from this book were exhibited in a one man show at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Nikon House
Gallery in New York. Six copies of an exhibition of Mr. Maroon's
U.S.A. photographs were mounted by
the United States Information Agency for worldwide display in over
a hundred countries in celebration of America's Bicentennial.
His fourth book,
The Egypt Story (with P. H. Newby), was published in 1979 by Abbeville
Press, New York, and printed in four languages. The book received
a Gold Medal at the 1982 International Book Art Exhibition in Leipzig.
An exhibition of photographs from the book was displayed in the
Smithsonian Institution's Dillon S. Ripley Gallery in 1993, and
the
Houston Museum of Science and Technology in 1995.
In September
1983 Fred's fifth book, Keepers of the Sea (with Edward L. Beach),
a book on the United States Navy, was published by the Naval Institute
Press in Annapolis, Maryland. The book received the Military Book
of the Year Award in 1984.
His sixth book,
Maroon on Georgetown, was published in November 1985 by Thomasson-Grant,
Inc., of Charlottesville, Virginia, and won the Gold Medal for photography
in the 1986 Art Directors' Club of Metropolitan Washington's annual
competition. An enlarged edition of the book was published in October
1997.
Fred Maroon's
seventh book, The English Country House: a Tapestry of Ages, was
published by Thomasson-Grant, Inc. in October 1987, and by Pavilion
Books and the National Trust in England in 1988. These photographs
were featured in the National Gallery of Art's major exhibition,
"The Treasure Houses of Britain."
Maroon's eighth
book, Jean-Louis: Cooking with the Seasons, on the cooking of Jean-Louis
Palladin, featured food photography as art. It was published in
October 1989 by Thomasson-Grant, Inc. The book won the Ben Franklin
Award from the Printing Institute of America, and the Golden Ink
Award.
Fred Maroon's
ninth book, on the Catholic University of America, Century Ended,
Century Begun, was published in September 1990 by the Catholic University
of America Press.
Maroon's tenth
book, The United States Capitol, with text by his wife, Suzy Maroon,
was published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, of New York, in June
1993, in anticipation of the bicentennial of the laying of the cornerstone
of the Capitol on September 18, 1793. An exhibition from the book
was mounted in the United States Capitol in the spring of 1994.
The Supreme
Court of the United States, a companion to the book on the Capitol,
was published in May 1996 by Thomasson-Grant & Lickle.
Maroon's last
book, The Nixon Years 1969–1974: White House to Watergate, (with
Tom Wicker) was published by Abbeville Press in August 1999 - the
twenty-fifth anniversary of President Nixon's resignation. A major
exhibition of these photographs from the Nixon-Watergate era was
shown at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American
History from July to December, 1999.
At the time
of his death Mr. Maroon was working on a book and exhibition featuring
photographs taken when he was a student in Europe in 1950-1951.
►► Some
of the artist's artwork
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