Bill Jay passes away

Sad news today that photo historian, publisher, author and photographer Bill Jay passed away in his sleep on Sunday in his recently adopted hometown of Samara in Costa Rica.

Bill was kind enough to provide an extremely well constructed and researched foreword to the book I published in 1999 ‘BRANDT The Photography of Bill Brandt’ (Thames & Hudson)

I visited him at his office at Arizona State University where he sat surrounded by random stacks of papers and in the swirl of cigarette smoke. I had a very amusing lunch with him and some of his best students.  He was a very generous spirit and had a depth of knowledge about photography that was par none. He will be very sorely missed.

“Everything about photography, everything I write about photography, everything I photograph has a feedback system which says: This is what it’s like to be human.”—Bill Jay in a 2007 interview by Darius Himes of the Photo District News.