Roy Pinney
Roy Schiffer Pinney (August 13, 1911 – August 9, 2010)[1] was a professional photographer, herpetologist, writer, journalist, war correspondent and pilot.
Pinney was the former president of the
Family history and name change
Pinney was born Pinyehrae Schiffer to Polish immigrant father Max Schiffer and mother Sarah Schiffer on the
Biography
The son of grocers, Pinney was born and raised on the Lower East Side. Pinney caught his first venomous snake, a rattler, at age 12 while attending Boy Scout camp. He was chastised, but it did not take.[2] He attended high school at DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school at that time on 10th Avenue and 59th Street in New York City with classmates and lifelong friends Bernard Herrmann and Abraham Polonsky.
In 1928 Pinney learned to use a camera and was employed by Underwood & Underwood through March 8, 1929.
Pinney bagged more than 1,000 venomous serpents all over the planet. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals gave him stray snakes in need of homes and he kept the best for himself.
His first love was photography. Pinney was wounded while photographing the
He changed his life's course through his collaboration with the nature writer
A 1971 divorce left him bitter, so he threw away many of his cameras and stopped taking pictures. He once invested his personal savings in a new television series about a 25-year-old zoologist's adventures, shot 39 episodes and couldn't sell it. "She really has a special charisma with animals," he insists to this day.[2]
On August 9, 2010 Pinney died at the age of 98, just four days before his 99th birthday.
Pinney lived in Sanderson's former apartment, as he had since the divorce, surrounded by artifacts from endangered cultures, an undisclosed number of snakes, and 50,000 aging photographs.
Herpetology
Pinney was a world traveling herpetologist who collected
Throughout his career Pinney developed a reputation as the go-to man for expert information on the care of snakes and other reptiles. During the 1980s and early 1990s the then active duty New York City police officers and now notorious "mafia cops",
Photography and films
In 1929 at the age of 18 Pinney became a
Later in his career Pinney owned and operated Photo-Library Inc., a stock photography business with nearly half a million photographs on file. The library included animals, architecture, babies, children, flowers, food, geography, girls, industrial, medical, personalities, romance, scenic views and sports. On its business cards Photo-Library Inc. touted its "100,000 Color Transparencies and 300,000 Black and White stock photographs."
Pinney's portrait of a baby won first prize in a Popular Photography photography competition beating out 46,000 other contestants and winning Pinney a new Packard convertible.
In 1963 Pinney won the first prize for television commercials at the
In 2002 a 13.5x10.5 print of Pinney's 1936 photograph of hands "Reading Braille" was displayed in the Guggenheim Museum as part of the Buhl Collection photography exhibition on hands.
In 2007 Pinney's photograph of two swimmers underwater in a pool appeared in a large coffee table book entitled POOLS by Kelly Klein. The book was published by Rizzoli. The ISBN is 0-8478-2918-9
Author
Pinney is the author of 24 books including:
- The Snake Book (1981) (ISBN 0-385-13547-5)
- Pets from Wood, Field and Stream (1969)
- Vanishing Tribes (1968) (ISBN 0-690-85943-0)
- Quest for the Unknown: Explorers of Today (1965)
- Wild Animal Pets (1965)
- Animals of the Bible (1964) (ASIN: B0007DV4UU)
- Careers with a Camera (1964)
- Advertising Photography: A Visual Communication book (1962)
- The Complete Book of Cave Exploration (1962)
- The Golden Book of Nature Crafts (1962)
- How to Survive an Atomic Attack (1961)
- The Golden Book of Wild Animal Pets (1959
- Underwater Archeology
- Slavery: Past and Present
- Animals, Inc.
- Vanishing Wildlife
- Young Israel
- Wild Life in Danger
- Collecting and Photographing your Microzoo
Since their publication all of his books have gone out of print and have not been re-released. Roy Pinney also wrote a number of books that were never published including The Python Book, Our Vanishing Animal Friends, Animals Lost Forever, The Encyclopedia of Snakes, Vanishing Amphibians, and a book on his time as a war correspondent.
War correspondent
In 1944 Pinney became a
At the time of Pinney's death he had written an unpublished book on being a war correspondent which included detailed stories of his travels in World War II Europe.
Friends and associates
Pinney went to elementary school with and was lifelong friends with
References
- ^ Martin, Douglas (August 21, 2010). "Roy Pinney, Man of Snakes, Baby Photos and Adventure, Is Dead at 98". The New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2016.
- ^ a b c Martin, Douglas (August 7, 1991). "About New York". The New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2016.