Luscious loves: Photographer Tom Palumbo (1921

Tom Palumbo: Photographer, creative director, teacher and theatre director…

About Tom Palumbo

He was born in Italy and grew up in New York City as a teenager.

His various jobs included building scale models for ships in an engineering company and being an assistant to photographer James Abbe which moved him into fashion photography. Abbe was known for taking many photographs of theater and movie performers, as well as news and fashion photography.

Palumbo’s early campaign work for Peck & Peck Department Store appeared in “Vogue” and “Harpers Bazaar” magazines (1949 to 1953), and he was a staff photographer at both “Vogue” (1959-1962) and “Harper’s Bazaar” (1953-1959) working with the famed art directors Alex Liberman and Alexey Brodovitch.

He worked at Ted Bates as Vice President of Creative Productions overseeing all TV commercials. As a teacher, he taught photography at Rhode Island School of Design, and directing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

He was a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and directed plays off-Broadway and in regional theatres. His last production was “An Evening of Proust” at the Lincoln Center in 1999. He was a life-long member of the Actors Studio.

Palumbo was married to 1950s model, Anne St. Marie for many years, and he documented many of the photos on his Flickr site.

He was later married to Patricia Bosworth, an American journalist, biographer, and former actress, model and faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Her 1984 book about Diane Arbus was turned into a film called “Fur” in 2006, starring Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr and Ty Burrell, and directed by Steven Shainberg. Other biographies include Montgomery Clift (1978) and Marlon Brando (2000).