![Frederick Eberstadt, Photographer of Socialites and Artists, Dies at 97](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/08/16/multimedia/09eberstadt-4-bfjt-print1/09eberstadt-4-bfjt-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Frederick Eberstadt, a fashion and society photographer whose varied work encompassed the parlors of Park Avenue as well as the gritty performance spaces of downtown Manhattan during New York’s avant-garde era of the 1960s, died on July 29 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his son, the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt.
Mr. Eberstadt had started on a career in banking, following in the footsteps of his father, Ferdinand Eberstadt, a lion of Wall Street who founded the investment bank Eberstadt & Company and pioneered the development of mutual funds.
But the younger Mr. Eberstadt left for a stint in television and then received a chance opportunity to work as an assistant to the photographer Richard Avedon that led him into a 30-year career behind the lens.
As a fashion photographer and photojournalist, he shot for Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, Town & Country, The New York Herald Tribune and many other publications. His subjects ran the spectrum, culturally, from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, decades after the former King Edward VIII of England abdicated the English throne, to the actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in their “Easy Rider” era as haute hippie Hollywood bad boys.
From his perch high in the Manhattan social firmament, he invited readers into the thin air of Manhattan’s money culture. The journalist Barbara Goldsmith once called his society photography “velvet and supersleek.”
But he also ventured downtown to mingle with Andy Warhol and chronicle the city’s explosive underground film and theater scene. In 1965, he merged the underground with the mainstream in a fashion spread for Life magazine starring Edie Sedgwick, the star-crossed starlet and Warhol muse, showcasing her fragile beauty in the latest mod fashions and dripping in jewels.