He designed some of the most visually exciting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. But his real love, and eventually his focus, was photography.
Lloyd Ziff was not yet a celebrated art director in 1968 when he photographed an art school classmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his girlfriend, Patti Smith, in their tiny Brooklyn apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Mr. Ziff said years later.
The black-and-white portraits he took are tender and moving, almost heartbreakingly so; as James Danziger, the gallerist who showed them in 2013, said recently: “Youth is moving. They capture a moment in time just before Patti and Robert were going to explode. They both carried an aura, and Lloyd was drawn to that. They wanted to be photographed just as much as he wanted to photograph them.”
Mr. Ziff went on to serve as an art director for some of the most influential and visually arresting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s, including Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Mapplethorpe and Ms. Smith, of course, would find their own fame, and tragedy, when Mr. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989. When Ms. Smith wrote of their coming-of-age in her 2010 memoir, “Just Kids,” she included a few of Mr. Ziff’s portraits.
“Although we weren’t particularly close,” Mr. Ziff said, “I believe we recognized in each other something we probably couldn’t put into words at the time.”
Mr. Ziff died at 81 on Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, N.Y., on Long Island’s North Fork, his husband, Stephen Kelemen, said. He said Mr. Ziff had been in declining health.
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