Morris Engel (1918–2005)

Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Abraham Lincoln High School. In 1936, he joined the Photo League, where he met Aaron Siskind and Paul Strand, who were major influences on his work. There he also met Ruth Orkin, his future wife. Engel became a staff photographer on the left-wing newspaper PM, before joining the Navy in 1941 at the start of World War II. He was a member of Combat Photo Unit 8 that landed on Normandy on D-Day. After the war, he worked for many national magazines, including Ladies Home Journal, Fortune, and Colliers. His initial interest in motion pictures reached a new level when he built a lightweight, hand-held 35mm camera with Charles Woodruff. This camera was a major factor in the production of his first feature film, Little Fugitive (1953), which he made independently of any studio with Ruth Orkin and Raymond Abrashkin. The film won the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival that year and an Academy Award nomination. Engel and Orkin married in 1952, and made a second feature film together, Lovers and Lollipops (1955). Engel also made Weddings and Babies in 1958 and I Need a Ride to California in 1968. Post-production work on that film was shelved until 1972, when it was finally completed, but for unknown reasons it was never released during Engel's lifetime. It finally received its premiere in 2019 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the 1980s, Engel began taking panoramic photographs on the streets of New York City. François Truffaut later cited Little Fugitive and its pioneering spontaneous production style as inspiration for the "New Wave" in French cinema and his film The 400 Blows (1959).