A tent-dwelling family at an Oregon read bedtime stories, 1969.
Photo by John Olson/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
“From the age of 10, I wanted to be a photographer. My father was a farmer, and when he passed away, he was still mystified that you took this little box out and pushed a button and a week later, from the drugstore, these images came back.” LIFE learned of the precocious John Olson (born 1947) through photos he took for Stars and Stripes while serving two years in Vietnam, where he was wounded twice. He became the magazine’s youngest staff photographer ever at age 21, and his youth was no doubt central to the success of a completely different sort of feature he shot for LIFE: on rock stars and their families.
—Adapted from The Great LIFE Photographers
Rock musician Eric Clapton w. his grandmother Rose in the house he bought her in Surrey. (Photo by John Olson/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
Women marching in New York at the Women’s Strike for Equality, a march in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. (Photo by John Olson/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
