Burt Steel, a New Orleans-based photographer who was noted for his talent, his versatility and his ability to put his subjects at ease, died Jan. 12 in Naples, Florida. He was 70.
Steel, who had retired to Naples, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said Danaë Columbus, a close friend.
A Times-Picayune photographer from 1976 until the early 1980s, “he was always visually stimulated,” Columbus said. “He saw things in a different light. He had a unique vision and perspective on things, and he’d want to capture it. He could walk down the street and see a good picture that you and I would pass by.”
One of Steel’s colleagues and friends was Bill Haber, a photographer for The States-Item and, later, The Associated Press.
“One of Burt’s really good qualities… was his ability to relate to people on all levels,” Haber said. “He could take his subjects and put them at ease and really connect with them one-on-one and connect his photographs to them.”
That ability paid off when Steel and Millie Ball, a Times-Picayune reporter, spent a year following Vickie Lacombe, a child who died of leukemia in 1980.
The Times-Picayune staff writer Millie Ball, left, and staff photographer Burt Steel pose outside the Odyssey House, 1125 N. Tonti St., after being awarded the Odyssey Institute’s 1980 national first place award in print journalisn. They won the prize for a special section, “Vickie and Carol” which appeared in the Sunday Sept. 21, 1980 of The Times-Picayune. The prize is awarded for outstanding journalistic effort about the problems of children.
“He was very kind,” said Carol Stromeyer, Vickie’s mother. “I felt like he was our support person. He became that to us, and I think we became that to him. He had a bond with my whole family. He was a quiet man, but he had a brain that was working all the time.”
“We both became totally obsessed with it,” Ball said of that assignment. “He got very emotional over the whole thing. We felt like they were family.”
During that period, “He took one day off, and that was the day the child died,” said Eliot Kamenitz, a former Times-Picayune photographer. “He felt he should have been there.”
Steel was a pallbearer at Vickie’s funeral.
Born Burton Steel in Mobile, Alabama, he attended the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg but did not graduate.
When Steel joined the newspaper, Haber said, “we were working with people who had been at the paper longer than we had been alive. Burt was able to see the value of their experience and what they had to offer.”
Among the subjects of his photographs were Carol Channing, Mother Teresa, Muhammad Ali, zydeco artist Boozoo Chavis and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
John Belushi signs autographs at Lake Forest Plaza February 17, 1977, before the ‘Live from New Orleans… It’s the ‘Saturday Night Live’ Mardi Gras episode.
After he left the newspaper, Steel did freelance work for an array of publications, including The Associated Press, United Press International and The New York Times.
During the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, he had a contract with Liggett & Myers to photograph artists, such as Linda Ronstadt and Willie Nelson, who performed in the riverfront amphitheater that the company sponsored.
For about 10 years, he operated Shooting Star, a gallery of photography in the Central Business District.
In a post on Steel’s Facebook page after his death, photographer Donn Young wrote, “I learned the essence of New Orleans news photography by just watching and working with Burt. His work is a tribute to documenting our generation.”
Survivors include a former wife, Joanna Broussard of Chicago; a daughter, Alexandra d’Eca of Toronto; a brother, Talbot Steel of Naples; and a sister, Meredith Steel Chastain of Dauphin Island, Alabama.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
