Leigh A. Wiener; Nationally Known Photographer

Leigh A. Wiener, a nationally recognized free-lance photographer who wrote nine books, had his own television show on photography and sold his works to such institutions as the National Portrait Gallery, has died. He was 62.

Wiener died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles of a rare blood disease that doctors said resulted from exposure to nuclear radiation. His exposure occurred in the late 1950s when he covered atomic bomb testing near Las Vegas for Life magazine.

Wiener, whose work was frequently exhibited in Southern California portrait galleries and museums, recently sold photographs of Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays and John F. Kennedy to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

He created and was co-host of the Emmy Award-winning television series “Talk About Pictures” and conceived the idea for the CBS television movie “Peary and Cook,” starring Richard Chamberlain and Rod Steiger, about the explorers’ race to the North Pole.

Using optical and camera equipment he designed and built, Wiener made the 1967 football documentary “A Slice of Sunday,” considered the prototype for “NFL Today.” In 1979, the Film Editor’s Guild named his program one of the two most innovative documentaries produced in 25 years.

The last of Wiener’s books was “Marilyn: A Hollywood Farewell,” published last year. Wiener frequently photographed Monroe during her life, and, although he refused to make the photograph public, even gained access to the Los Angeles County morgue to photograph her body after her apparent suicide.

Wiener worked for Life, Time, Look, Fortune and Sports Illustrated magazines, as well as political campaigns and even the Vatican. His celebrity shots included five U.S. presidents, Pope John Paul II and stars such as Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, George Burns, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

Despite his innovative forays into television, Wiener believed most strongly in the value of still photographs to capture history and personalities.

“Two or three of the most important news stories of this century occurred before live news cameras,” he told The Times in 1988. “ABC, CBS and NBC had (Lee Harvey) Oswald being shot by (Jack) Ruby live. It lasted 2.3 seconds. No one knew what happened. They re-ran it and re-ran it and still nobody knew what happened.

“One photographer from the Dallas Times (Herald) took one still photograph and the world knew what happened. You could look into the eyes of Ruby and Oswald and see the relationship.”

Wiener was introduced to photography in a grade-school science class and made his first sale when he was 9, offering photos of the U.S. Open tennis tournament near his home in Forest Hills, N.Y., to the local paper.

His family moved to Los Angeles and he got his first magazine assignment at 14 when Collier’s asked him to shoot Hollywood agent Charles Feldman.

After he finished high school, Wiener was working in the Times library filing pictures in 1949 when a San Marino child named Kathy Fiscus fell into a 97-foot well, making national news. Wiener, ignoring the 100 or so photographers clustered around the well, went to the child’s home and photographed her empty back-yard swing. More than 300 newspapers used his photograph, Life called, and The Times made him a full-time photographer.

During his seven years at The Times, Wiener studied political science at UCLA and covered various major assignments, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first tour of Asia.

After serving on Stars and Stripes in Europe in 1954, Wiener published his eloquent impressions of Cold War Berlin in pictures and words in The Times.

“West Berlin is a pastel city, a city of life and hope, a city where industrious Germans have cleaned up much of the damage of World War II and sent the city’s economy soaring toward prosperity,” he wrote. “East Berlin is a gray city, a separate Orwellian world of propaganda and posters, of double-think and double-talk, of shattered structures looming skeletonlike against 10-year-old rubble.”

Wiener started his free-lance business in 1956, photographing celebrities and events and writing and lecturing about photography.

Taught by his father to believe that he was as good as anybody, Wiener was never cowed by his subjects.

“I’m not in awe of anyone, and I don’t take any guff,” he told The Times in 1986. “I know my job, and I know I’m good. I make it clear who’s in control. Them or me. Of course, it’s me.”

Wiener recalled his invitation to Sutton Place in England to photograph oil billionaire J. Paul Getty in 1968:

“He kept telling me I didn’t know what I was doing because I was taking shot after shot. If I was any good, he said, I would have taken only one or two and gone home. He was really baiting me.”

Wiener said he looked the wealthy Getty in the eye and rejoined: “If you really believe that, when you drill for oil, you would just dig one hole.”

Getty and he got along well after that, he said, and he took several more shots.

Wiener is survived by his wife, Joyce, his son, Devik, and a sister.

The family has requested that any memorial donations be made to the Israel Cancer Fund, 11726 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles 90049.