Wayne Miller, Photographer Who Captured Black Chicago, Dies : The Picture Show : NPR

Wayne Miller, Photographer Who Captured Black Chicago, Dies : The Picture Show : NPR: Pioneering photographer Wayne Miller, who captured some of the first images of the destruction of Hiroshima, died this week at the age of 94. The Chicago native was renowned for a trailblazing series of postwar portraits of black Americans in Chicago and for co-curating the groundbreaking international photo exhibition "The Family of Man."

"I believe a level of intimacy has been lost," says Paul Berlanga, director of Chicago's Stephen Daiter Gallery, which has mounted an exhibition in memory of Miller.

Wayne Miller was born in Chicago in 1918. He studied banking and worked only part-time as a photographer, but during World War II, he became a member of Edward Steichen's U.S. Navy Combat Photo Unit.

One of his best-known wartime photos shows a wounded pilot being pulled from a fighter plane after it was shot down. Miller had been scheduled to be aboard the plane, according to his granddaughter Inga Miller, and the photographer who took his place was killed.