Bill Eppridge (b. 1938 - d. 2013) was a LIFE Magazine photojournalist most known for his 1968 photograph of the dying Robert F. Kennedy. Regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Eppridge was a beloved member of the Salt community. 

Eppridge was born in Argentia to American parents and moved back to Delaware when he was still young. He was 10 years old when a man visited his town to take and sell photographs of children on his pony. According to an interview with the Associated Press in 2005, the allure of a career in  photography was inseparable from the fact that he “would get to own a pony and everything” (The New York Times). 

Ironically, after completing his bachelor’s degree in photojournalism, Eppridge’s first award-winning photograph in 1958 depicted a horse under a foreboding Missouri sky. 

As a photojournalist, Eppridge represented American —and world—history, his imaging defining a nation. Eppridge understood the influence of documentation: “I became a historian,” he often said (The New York Times).  Eppridge  covered Latin American revolutions, the lives of people addicted to heroin as abuse of narcotics spread across the U.S., political campaigns, the Olympics, Woodstock, and key figures that dominated the American psyche—such as Barbra Streisend when she was still emerging into fame and the long anticipated arrival of the Beatles to the U.S. and their behind -the-scenes lives on tour. Eppridge was also a key photographer in the Civil Rights Movement, capturing the funeral of James Chaney who was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, and Fannie Lou Hammer at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.