Farrell Grehan was born in New York in 1926. He came to photography through painting: as a young man he studied at the Art Students League under Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Will Barnet, and the painter’s concern with color, shape and the edge of the frame stayed with him for the rest of his working life.
Recognition came early. In 1953 his photograph “City Child”, a girl alone in an overgrown city lot seen through the slats of a broken fence, won a $2,000 prize, and the Museum of Modern Art included his work in the exhibition Always the Young Strangers. Two years later Edward Steichen chose “City Child” for The Family of Man, the exhibition that went on to tour the world and be seen by some nine million people. MoMA showed his photographs in four further exhibitions through 1968.
For about twelve years Grehan was a contract photographer for LIFE. The magazine sent him to record a changing New York, the Broadway stage and the New York City Ballet, and into the studios and homes of artists. He photographed Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, the dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Gelsey Kirkland, the conductor Pierre Monteux, the psychologist Jean Piaget and the playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In 2004 he was included in The Great LIFE Photographers.
What began as a private pastime, photographing wildflowers, became a second career. The Odyssey Book of American Wildflowers (1964), with text by the botanist Harold William Rickett, established him as a photographer of the natural world, and assignments for National Geographic followed. He retraced the journeys of John Muir for John Muir’s Wild America (1976) and those of Henry David Thoreau, from Walden Pond to the Maine woods, for the magazine in 1981.
He was equally drawn to the meeting of the built and the natural. He photographed the gardens of Roberto Burle Marx in Brazil and Russel Wright’s house at Dragon Rock, and over many years he returned to the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. That work was gathered in Visions of Wright (1997), which pairs his photographs of forty-eight sites with Wright’s own words.
His assignments took him across nearly every American state and to Burma, Yemen, Egypt, Lapland, Prague, Moscow, Crete and the Aran Islands of Ireland, among many other places. He worked from the 1950s into the 2000s.
Farrell Grehan died on May 6, 2008. His archive is cared for by his sons, Patrick and Chris, who welcome inquiries about licensing his photographs.