GOLDENS BRIDGE, N.Y. - For retired People Magazine photo editor Ira Berger, some assignments have remained vivid long after the film was developed and the deadlines passed.
One of those assignments came in 1978, when Berger spent five shows on tour with a rising country music star named Dolly Parton.
Nearly five decades later, Berger still remembers the woman behind the rhinestones, wigs and unmistakable voice.
“She was forever sunshine,” Berger recalled.
Parton, who passed away on Aug. 25 at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer, was already a major country star when Berger joined her tour. But 1978 was also a pivotal year in her career. Her album Here You Come Again had helped propel her beyond country music and into the mainstream, and the title song earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Berger, then working on assignment for Star Magazine, was there to document Parton on the road.
The tour included stops in Wisconsin, including Madison and Milwaukee. Parton performed at Milwaukee’s Summerfest on June 30, 1978, as part of a 58-city tour.
For Berger, however, the experience was about more than getting the right shot.
“She was everything you saw, very affable,” he said.
And the personality that audiences saw from the stage was the same one Berger encountered behind the scenes.
“She had this great sense of humor and ability to tell a joke,” Berger said.
For Berger, the assignment was part of a remarkable career that began far from celebrity photography. He originally studied physics and worked in submarine navigation before deciding to leave that career and become a photographer in the 1960s.
He considers himself fortunate to have worked during what he calls the “Golden Age of Photography.” It was an era when getting a picture into print could involve considerably more than sending an email or uploading a digital file. Berger remembers once driving across someone’s front lawn to get photographs delivered in time to meet a deadline.
Those days may be gone, but Berger has never really stopped taking pictures.
After retiring from People, he continued working as a photographer and still travels to New York City to document religious multiculturalism. In 2019, he published “The Bell in the Crown: Photographing the Jews of Crown Heights and their Rebbe,” a collection documenting the orthodox Jewish population of Crown Heights.
Berger moved from Queens to Goldens Bridge three years ago, bringing with him decades of photographs and memories from a career that placed him in the middle of some extraordinary moments.
His time with Parton is one of them.
In the years after Berger photographed her on tour, Parton’s career expanded far beyond music. She became a successful actress, author, businesswoman and philanthropist, while continuing to write and perform music. Her influence eventually reached millions of children through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the literacy program she launched in 1995 in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, in honor of her father, Robert Lee Parton, who had been unable to read or write.
What began as a local effort grew into an international program that now sends children millions of free, age-appropriate books each month.
Parton’s legacy stretches well beyond the songs and performances that made her famous. It includes the people she entertained, the people she helped and the people who encountered her along the way.
For Berger, who was fortunate enough to spend five shows alongside her in 1978, the lasting memory is much simpler.
The superstar he saw behind the camera was the same authentic person audiences thought they knew.
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