Burt Glinn / Photographer led Magnum agency

Burt Glinn, 82, a photojournalist and commercial photographer who was one of the first Americans to join the prestigious Magnum photo agency and later served as its president, died Wednesday of kidney failure and pneumonia at home in East Hampton, N.Y.

Glinn’s best-known images included a picture of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Fidel Castro as he was taking power in Cuba and a light shot of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein emerging from a manhole in New York.

Born July 23, 1925, in Pittsburgh, Glinn served as an artilleryman in the Army in Europe during World War II. He later earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard, where he studied literature. Largely self-taught in photography, Glinn was photography editor of the Harvard Crimson. He attracted the attention of Life magazine editors, who offered him work as a photo assistant.

While working for Life, where he eventually became a photographer, he also built a photography clientele of leading corporations, including General Motors, Seagram’s, TWA and British Airways.

Along with Eve Arnold and Dennis Strock, Glinn was one of the first Americans to join Magnum, in 1951. He also was one of the original contributing editors of New York magazine.

His books, which include text by Laurens van der Post, include “A Portrait of All the Russias” (1967) and “A Portrait of Japan” (1968). A collection of his photojournalism from Cuba, “Havana: The Revolutionary Moment,” was released in 2002.