Monte Zucker

His marriage to Sondra Wool Zucker ended in divorce. Zucker always recognized his Homosexuality after his divorce. Survivors include two daughters, Tammi Zucker Thurm of Greensboro, N.C., and Sherri Heller of Sacramento, CA; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His brother Seymour (Sy) Zucker passed away in January 2021.

He was Brides Magazine's Wedding Photographer of the Year for 1990 and United Nations Photographer of the Year for 2002, and one of Canon's "Explorers of Light". Additionally, he was a prolific author and teacher, with monthly columns in magazines such as Shutterbug. Several manufacturers made equipment bearing his name, most notably Westcott's "Monte Reflector" and ALM's "Monte Zucker Pneumatic Posing Stool".

Monte's decision to retire from the wedding business and relocate to Florida in the 1990s was liberating for him creatively because it freed him from the constraint of his classic wedding style and coincided with the innovations of digital photography and the Internet. He embraced both with the same enthusiasm and lack of creative restraints he had as a teenager discovering photography for the first time, and shared his experiences with others via Zuga.net, a website collaboration with a former full-time assistant Gary Bernstein who had struck out on his own in 1972 and become a recognized fashion and celebrity photographer and author.

He noted in one column that one of his maxims was "See the finished picture before you even snap the shutter!", repeated at each of three training seminars attended by, amongst others, British photographer Barney Douglas, in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, but at the same time he stated of a digitally retouched image, "Did I have this in mind when I first created the image? Yes and no. I wanted to create something artistic, something special. Did I know how I was going to do it? Not really."

Monte Zucker started doing photography in high school in Washington, D.C., shooting for friends who remained loyal clients over the years as they became successful and affluent professionals and businessmen. By the early 1970s he had specialized in wedding photography, working almost exclusively for the most affluent members of the Jewish community in the Washington, D.C. area, primarily shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs.

In the 1960s most formal portraits were taken with large cumbersome pack and head flash units, with wedding reception "candid" photos taken with a single flash on camera and dimensionally flat lighting.

By the late 1960s color had started replacing black and white for shooting weddings, and electronic flash guns replaced flash bulbs. A technical shortcoming of color was a much shorter range on the prints which could not reproduce the full range of detail in a photograph containing a bride in white dress standing with the groom in a black suit when a single flash on camera was used. Familiar with conventional studio lighting, thanks in part to training with New Jersey photographer Joe Zeltsman, Monte understood that the solution to the shorter range film was to control the range of the scene with two lights; one off camera for modeling (key light), over a foundation of even centered light (fill) to control the tone of the shadows. With the invention of the photo-cell trigger which allowed wireless firing of the off-camera "key" flash, Monte utilized the technology to create studio-like lighting "on the fly" at wedding receptions using two identical direct flash units, one mounted over the camera as fill to control the shadow tone and a second optically triggered key light for 3D modeling which he mounted on a rolling converted medical IV stand, a clever solution to the logistics of working with the off-camera light.

In the 1960s most wedding photographers were members of the Professional Photographers of America (PPofA), which regularly held print competitions at meetings and conventions. Monte, with his innovative combination of window lighting and dual flash, started winning competitions at the state and national levels in the "Candid" category of the competitions, which gave him recognition beyond his small niche market. Awards in competition led to offers to teach at PPofA events and training seminars, and to writing a column on wedding photography he called "Candid Comments" in the PPofA magazine. He also attracted the support of sponsors such as Rolleiflex (whose cameras he used at the time) and Meisel Photo Labs (which he used for his own work).

Monte Zucker M.Photog.Cr., Hon.M.Photog., API, F-ASP (born on September 1, 1929, died March 15, 2007) was an American photographer. He specialized in wedding photography, entering it as a profession in 1947. In the 1970s he operated a studio in Silver Spring, Maryland. Later he lived in Florida.