Fred McDarrah

The American photographer Fred McDarrah, who has died aged 81, helped to create the image of Greenwich Village at its counter-cultural peak, that era which mixed the New York School of Art, the Beat movement and the coffee-house folk revival - and captivated the world until rock music and revolution switched attentions elsewhere.

His most memorable images define the era: Bob Dylan in Sheridan Square giving a military salute, Jack Kerouac at a reading, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross; Ed Sanders in front of the Peace Eye bookstore, artists Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern or Jasper Johns in his studio. Yet for McDarrah this was all part of the job: he was the staff photographer for the weekly Village Voice, and this was his neighbourhood coverage.

Although his portraits are shown in galleries, McDarrah was a photo-journalist in the best tradition of the New York tabloids. "If someone called me a fine-art photographer, I'd laugh them out of the room," he told an interviewer in 1999. Covering his beat south of 14th Street, he documented the 1969 Stonewall battles between gay men and the New York police, and the rubble of a house on West 12th street whose basement was the bomb factory of the Weather Underground, who briefly attempted to wage guerrilla warfare in the US. He covered Robert Kennedy in the Lower East Side slums, and anti-war protesters in Washington Square.

But McDarrah was never a typical village-ite. In fact, soon after joining the Voice, he began brokering beatniks. He placed an ad in the classifieds section: Rent a Beatnik. From $15 for half an hour of poetry reading, "tuxedo park parties" could hire "rare genuine beatniks, badly groomed but brilliant ... completely equipped: beard, eye shades, old army jacket, Levis, frayed shirts, sneakers or sandals (optional). Lady beatniks also available, usual garb: all black." Taking a small commission, he provided much-needed money to many of the people he was covering.

McDarrah was born in Brooklyn, and as a 12-year-old bought his first camera on impulse for 39 cents to take pictures of the 1939 New York World's Fair. After serving as a paratrooper during the second world war, he remained in Japan to photograph the occupation. Thanks to the GI Bill, he took a journalism degree at New York University, though when he joined the Voice in 1959 it was as an advertising salesman. He soon became the paper's only staff photographer, and as the Voice grew he headed the department, helping a number of photographers, among them James Hamilton and Sylvia Platchy, to successful careers.

McDarrah's journalistic training meant he understood what reporters were looking for to illustrate their stories, and Voice reporters loved him. Among his most frequent targets was the infamous New York fixer Roy Cohn, whose essence McDarrah captured in situations as different as his birthday party at Studio 54, or giving instructions to a young Donald Trump, another Voice bete noire. "He never missed a fat cat with a fork or knife in their hand," recalled Voice writer Wayne Barrett.

His 1960 book, The Beat Scene, remains the outstanding visual chronicle of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and their time. His pictures capture the feel of performers from the audience's point of view - the atmosphere of smoky coffee houses and bars - while also providing candid portraits. New York, New York (1964) covered the whole city, while by the time he produced Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village (1966) with his wife Gloria, he was already looking back at the end of the era, a signal confirmed by his next book, The New Bohemia (1967). He used a 1972 Guggenheim grant to travel across the US, photographing America outdoors, and developing pictures in a tent in the manner of his Village predecessors Joseph Steiglitz or Georgia O'Keeffe.

Over the years, Greenwich Village became a gentrified neighbourhood of expensive apartments, and the Voice turned into an advertising-laden free-sheet. But McDarrah remained on the masthead, as consulting photo editor, until his death. His later books were mostly retrospective, with titles like Anarchy, Protest and Rebellion and the Counterculture That Changed America (2003), Kerouac and Friends: a Beat Generation Album (2002), and Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village (1996). He died in his sleep in his Greenwich Village house, the day after celebrating his 81st birthday and his 47th wedding anniversary. He is survived by Gloria and two sons.

· Frederick William McDarrah, photographer, born November 5 1926; died November 6 2007

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