Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, November 12, 2009
Three months ago, Robert Cameron was hanging out of a helicopter taking pictures of Lombard Street. That was the last flight for the indefatigable "Above San Francisco" photographer who died Tuesday at his home in Pacific Heights.
He was 98 and in the midst of his last show - "Environmental Journey: Robert Cameron's Aerial Photography of our Pacific Rim," which is on display at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco.
"He just wore out," said his son, Tony Cameron.
Over four decades, Mr. Cameron produced 15 coffee table books in the "Above" series, with 3 million copies in print. These include overhead views of New York, London, Washington, D.C., Paris, Mexico City, Chicago. There are four volumes of "Above San Francisco."
Lifelong interest
Robert William Cameron was born April 21, 1911, in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was raised. After his first year at the University of Iowa, he dropped out and spread his tuition money across six months in Paris.
He'd been taking pictures since his father, a dentist, gave him a Brownie at age 8, so upon his return he landed a job as a news photographer at the Des Moines Register. He got his start shooting aerials when he contracted with the U.S. Army to take night pictures of exploding ordnance and tracers during World War II.
After the war, Mr. Cameron, who was by then married to his high school sweetheart, Janet Elliott, moved their four children to New York, where he became partner in a perfume company, Marcel Rochas, which is still going. He was a regular in a gin game on a commuter train to Darien, Conn., until Thanksgiving Day 1959, when he convened a family meeting.
"He said, 'I'm tired of the frozen winters and the steaming summers,' " recalled Tony Cameron. " 'I'm in love with the city of San Francisco, and I want to move there. Who's in?' "
They arrived in January 1960, and he started Cameron and Co., selling champagne-formula shampoo and a product that purported to cool cigarette smoke so it would be less harmful.
His big break came in 1964, when he created and published "The Drinking Man's Diet," a concept that Chronicle columnist Herb Caen could embrace.
"Herb Caen launched it, and it caused a lot of excitement and sold 2,400,000 copies at a dollar apiece," Mr. Cameron said in a Chronicle interview in 2005.
