My pal Libby Corridor, who has died aged 81, was a proficient road and press photographer, author and collector.
Her assortment of 1000’s of classic canine pictures was revealed as 4 books by Bloomsbury between 2000 and 2007, then acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute, which referred to as it “presumably the biggest variety of canine photos ever gathered by any single particular person”.
Libby taught herself pictures from Fashionable Images journal after receiving a Field Brownie for her seventh birthday. After leaving the Rudolf Steiner college in New York at 16, she labored for six months within the picture lab at Life journal, then at Village Voice as distribution supervisor.
At 18, she moved to Vienna, the place she took the images of which she was most proud. A friendship with the American photojournalist Walker Evans helped her refine her method.
Having moved to Suffolk within the mid Nineteen Sixties to work at AS Neill’s Summerhill college, she documented life in her native pub, the Engineer in Leiston, in a sequence of pictures following the opening of a nuclear energy station in close by Sizewell.
Libby was born in New York to William McKinley Osborne II, a newspaperman, restaurateur and clerk, and Charlotte (nee Cameron), a designer and antique-store proprietor. The household, by Libby’s account, flitted between Manhattan, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine.
From 1960, whereas residing in Vienna, she started a four-year relationship with Arthur S (Anand) Lall, an Indian diplomat and author, and was subsequently briefly married to Peter Wooden. Assembly the author John Berger in a Genevan grocery store in 1964 started a lifelong friendship. I met her later via writing Berger’s biography. Nevertheless it was whereas she was a press photographer for the Each day Employee (now the Morning Star) in London in 1966 that she met the political cartoonist Tony Corridor; they settled in Clapton, east London, and married in 1973.
Following her marriage, Libby wound down her skilled pictures profession. In later years, she took Open College programs in geology and science, and have become an professional on Arnold Bennett’s novels.
After Tony’s loss of life in 2008, she had “Cease! Don’t resuscitate, residing will extant” tattooed on her chest. Her prognosis with end-stage idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2017 didn’t dim her sense of humour, her curiosity in regards to the world or her capacity to journey it in her creativeness. Shetland was her final nice fascination. Although she knew she would by no means go to, she fell asleep each night time listening to Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham’s tune By Dundas Loch.
“Mine has been life measured out in canine,” she wrote in her memoir, self-published in 2019. Her final, Pip, lives together with her stepson, Andrew, and his spouse, Laura.
Andrew and her brother, Billy, survive her.
