Photographers

A Canadian free-lance photographer traveling with the contras inside Nicaragua has been killed in the northern department of Jinotega, a guerrilla official said Friday. Peter Bertie, 41, was on assignment for the Toronto Sun when he was killed Thursday, a newspaper spokesman said. Aristides Sanchez, a leader of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, said by telephone that Bertie was hit by a rocket fired from a Nicaraguan army helicopter.

Three photographers who took pictures of Britain's Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed after their fatal Paris car crash were acquitted of invading the couple's privacy. Jacques Langevin, Christian Martinez and Fabrice Chassery, whose photos were confiscated, were among the photographers who pursued the couple's car Aug. 31, 1997. The court ruled that a crashed vehicle on a public highway is not a private area.

Nearly four decades after their deaths, four combat photographers received a museum burial Thursday as family, friends and former colleagues recalled how the men gave their lives to show the world "Vietnam as they saw it." A helicopter carrying the four photographers was shot down over a mountainside in southern Laos on Feb. 10, 1971. Human remains were recovered in 1998, along with wreckage including camera parts, film and broken watches.

Television news photographers from every station in the city circled the Grossman Burn Center on Monday to show support for KABC Channel 7 reporter Adrienne Alpert, who is expected to have her left arm amputated today as a result of a freak accident. Organizers said they wanted to let not only Alpert but Alpert's photographer, Heather MacKenzie, know they care.

Los Angeles police Friday arrested an Arleta man who allegedly posed as a photographer for a modeling agency to entice teen-age girls into posing in lingerie or in the nude and then sexually assaulted them. Police said Jack Cone, 52, is suspected of using the modeling scam for more than two years to entice victims--all Latinas from poor families in the central and northeastern San Fernando Valley.

At age 88, Helen Levitt is losing her fight against fame. For the past 35 years, the New York street photographer led a carefully private life in a modest apartment, four flights up in a Greenwich Village brownstone. Her pictures, celebrated by critics as a uniquely unvarnished record of New York life, settled in the important American museums, while she famously declined invitations to interpret her work.

On his way home, after being thrown out of the Australian Open for losing his temper, John McEnroe directed his anger Monday at an Associated Press photographer who was attempting to take the tennis player's picture as he and his family arrived at Los Angeles International Airport. "He stuck his finger in my face, swore at me and told me to get out of his way," the photographer, Nick Ut, said. "At first, I thought he was going to kill me. He kept yelling at me, swearing at me.

Barry Howe has been to the steep slopes of Mt. Everest, the bluffs of the Grand Canyon, and the Egyptian desert in search of the most breathtaking photograph. But after traveling around the globe for 20 years, the 54-yera-old photographer said he's found the best place for photos is right here in the United States at the country's major league baseball stadiums. It took him two years, but he eventually got his 1950s-era Deardorff camera to every stadium.

The California Chicano News Media Assn. awarded Los Angeles Times photographer Annie Wells its 1999 Ruben Salazar Award for photojournalism Friday. The awards are given to California journalists "whose work exemplifies excellence while contributing to the fair and accurate portrayal of Latinos in the media," the Los Angeles-based group said. Wells won for her photograph of a Nicaraguan man mourning the loss of 72 relatives to Hurricane Mitch.

Looking at Jeff Gates' photograph of an abandoned house, a woman in the gallery burst into tears. Besides capturing the gracefulness of the elevated ramps of the Century (105) Freeway, Gates' photos bring back memories of how people's lives changed forever when the freeway was built. The woman in the gallery remembered the person who lived in one run-down house he photographed--and that she killed herself there.