He captured the magic of Miami through his camera lens. Ray Fisher has died at 96
Ray Fisher was never one to blend in with the crowds. With his memorable red bow tie, old-fashioned hat and 35-millimeter camera, Fisher was always at the center of Miami’s most glamorous star-filled events, snapping iconic pictures that landed the posters teenagers cherished.
His pictures also filled the country’s top magazines and made every major television network.
He was there in the 1950s when Frank Sinatra played the Fontainebleau Hotel’s La Ronde Room, and in the ‘60s when Muhammad Ali dethroned Sonny Liston in Miami Beach and Academy Award-winning actress Liza Minnelli made her debut in Coconut Grove.
A longtime resident of Miami Beach and Pinecrest, Fisher died on July 27 at 96.
“He loved people and loved telling jokes, but he was always serious when it came to business. Photography was his whole life,” his wife of 67 years, Suzanne Fisher, said. “I can’t think of anyone he didn’t photograph.”
Fisher captured 11 presidents, Queen Elizabeth and countless celebrities, including jazz icon Louis Armstrong and actors Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda.
“If there was a paparazzi in Miami [in the ‘60s], it would have been Ray Fisher,” said Charles Sherman, a former editor for the Miami Herald’s International Edition and a longtime friend of the family.
A teenager with a star-filled nightlife
Fisher was born on June 24, 1924, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Hungarian immigrants. He was a child when his family moved to New York City, where he shot his first celebrity photograph of former heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, now featured digitally in the Life Picture Collection.
Shortly after his father — who processed and printed photographs for a living — died at age 42, Fisher and his mother moved to Miami Beach in 1940. By then, he “was hooked on photography,” Fisher told the Herald some years later.
He made a name for himself as a teenager, while studying at Miami Beach High School. He would take shots of celebrities at popular night clubs and evening venues such as the Olympia Theater in Miami, and sell them to friends, publicity agents or the stars themselves, the Herald reported in a profile on Fisher in 1984. He also interned at NBC in New York for six months.
A combat photographer in World War II
Not yet out of high school, Fisher was drafted into the Army and served in the graves registration unit, taking pictures in cemeteries until 1943, when he sent what he would later define as a life-changing letter to the commanding officer at Army Signal Corps Pictorial Service — then home to teams of photographers and documentarists who covered combat where journalists couldn’t or wouldn’t go, and today the largest collection of still images in the U.S. National Archives.
Fisher’s note convinced the commander to transfer him to the agency’s headquarters in Queens, the Kaufman Astoria Studios, which the Army took over from Paramount Pictures during the war to produce training and patriotic films.
In World War II, Fisher photographed the only all-Black soldier tank company, known as the “Black Panthers,” in 1944 and U.S. troops crossing the Danube River in May 1945, a key victory in the war against Nazi Germany.
He was there as troops liberated Nazi concentration camps, taking pictures of mass graves and soldiers and people fleeing.
That May, he was shot three times by a surrendering German soldier in Austria, he said in 2015 during an interview for The Miami Beach Visual Memoirs Project, a video archive of the residents and makers of the city.
Fisher was with another combat photographer when he approached a group of soldiers and demanded in German that they give up their pistols. One of them shot him in the leg, the back and the torso, he recalled.
He played dead and recovered in a hospital in France, although one of the bullets remained in his left leg for the rest of his life. He was later awarded a Purple Heart and a special commendation “for Exceptionally Meritorious Service” for assisting in the recovery of French treasures.
Looking back, Fisher said the soldier probably shot him because he was wearing a scarf made of scraps of red fabric, resembling the bright tone of the Nazi flag.
“I think they thought that that was [a] German flag and I tore it up and made a scarf out of it. That’s probably why they shot me,” Fisher said in the interview.
From the University of Miami to New York’s Lincoln Center
At the University of Miami, Fisher served as editor of all of the university’s prize-winning publications, including the Miami Hurricane, and co-founded TEMPO magazine, which ran on campus from Oct. 1949 to April 1971.
He was nearly 30 when he joined the Miami Herald in 1953 as a staff photographer and a picture editor. That’s where he began his collection of presidential pictures, capturing President Lyndon Johnson in Fort Lauderdale in 1964. He declined an offer to work for Life magazine because he wanted to stay in Miami, according to James Grippando, a New York Times best-selling author and Fisher’s friend of almost 30 years.
During his 16 years at the Herald, Fisher was the go-to photographer for celebrity events.
“My dad, when he was writing a jazz column for the Herald, would get Ray to take photos of the jazz celebrities at the Beach hotels,” said Sherman, the son of former Herald columnist Fred Sherman. “The reason was Ray was the only photographer with a tux.”
When Fred Sherman died in July 2014, Fisher recalled his time covering the Miami Beach entertainment scene. “I don’t recall the tux,” he said, before admitting that, indeed, Sherman had him wear one.
It was during his time in Miami that Fisher captured a young Cassius Clay resting before a workout in Miami Beach, as he prepared for the fight that would help make him into “The Greatest.” The picture of the man who would become Muhammad Ali was blown up into autographed posters that decorated the walls of teenagers across the country.
In Miami, Fisher also met his wife, who worked as his business manager for several decades. The Fishers had three children — one of whom, Richard, has since died — and later bought a home in Pinecrest, where they lived for 62 years.
After leaving the Miami Herald in 1969, Fisher went on to take photographs for Time magazine, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times and Playboy, as well as ABC, NBC, CBS and HBO.
“His friends used to tease him because he did a lot of work for Playboy,” his wife said, chuckling. “They would say, ‘Take me with you, take me with you.’”
Over the years, Fisher took more than 600,000 black-and-white negatives, which he collected in indexed envelopes. His boxed color collection included over 5,000 plastic sheets, each with 20 slides on them, Grippando said.
Of all of them, his wife said her favorite is a black-and-white 1962 portrait of President John F. Kennedy in which he clutches his hands in front of his face while listening to a speech at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.
In the late 1980s, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City displayed over 200 of his prints. Fisher’s photographs were also exhibited at the Historical Museum of South Florida in 1998, where they remain today in a permanent collection.
His prints are currently sold at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City.
Fisher retired about five years ago, according to his wife.
No services will be held
Fisher’s wife said there will be no services.
“That’s what he wanted. Some day, when we can and the virus has diminished, I am going to have a wonderful, big party for him to celebrate his life,” she said Monday. “It’s much better that way.”
In addition to his wife, Fisher is survived by son Andrew Fisher, a cinematographer in Atlanta, and daughter, Julie Fisher, a sculptor and Pilates instructor in New York City.
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
