© John Dominis/Time Inc/Courtesy of the Monroe Gallery “Mickey Mantle Having a nasty Day at Yankee Stadium, Long island,” 1956, photographed by John Dominis for all times magazine.

John Dominis, who photographed sports, politics, celebrities and culture as a staff photographer at LIFE from the 1950s to the 1970s, died December 30 at his home in Ny city,  Life.time.com reports. He had recently undergone heart surgery, in line with a domain install by his companion, Evelyn Floret.

In his time at LIFE, Dominis covered five Olympic Games, capturing the enduring photo of medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos making the Black Power salute at the medal stand on the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, in addition the Korean War, President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech in Berlin, the Woodstock Festival in 1968 and President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972.

Born in 1921 in La, Dominis studied cinematography on the University of Southern California but left in 1943 to enlist within the Air Force where he served at the photography staff.  He then began a career as a contract photographer for magazines. He was made a staff photographer at LIFE in 1950.

Among the topics Dominis documented in intimate photo essays were Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Robert Redford. Dominis said, “The beauty of working with LIFE was that i used to be given the entire support and time and cash, whatever was required, to do almost any type of work i needed to do, anywhere on earth. It was like having a grant, a Guggenheim grant, but permanently.”

After LIFE ceased publication as a monthly print magazine in 1972, Dominis worked as a photograph editor at People and as an editor at Sports Illustrated. He continued to shoot photos, and shot images for 5 cookbooks by Giuliani Bugialli.

Dominis’s books included Sinatra: An Intimate Portrait (2002) and Steve McQueen: Photographs by John Dominis (2010). In 2008, Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, organized a retrospective of Dominis’s work; his work is included within the gallery’s show of LIFE photographers’ work, on view now through January 24. The exhibit “Steve McQueen: King of Cool,” shown in 2012 at ATLAS Gallery in London, was made of Dominis’s photos from 1963 during time he spent with the young actor and his wife.