LLOYD ZIFF, born on this date, (d: 8/1/2024) was an American photographer and art director. He was the art director for Vanity Fair, House & Garden, and Rolling Stone.  He was not yet a celebrated art director in 1968 when he photographed an art school classmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his girlfriend, Patti Smith, in their tiny Brooklyn apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Mr. Ziff said years later.

Ziff was born in Detroit, the only child of Frances (Maimes) Ziff and Max Ziff, an upholsterer. Lloyd’s father died when Lloyd was 5, and he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. Lloyd graduated from Beverly Hills High School, and in 1967 earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

Mr. Ziff spent the 1970s in California, between San Francisco, where he worked for Rolling Stone, and Los Angeles, where he had grown up and where he worked at Playgirl magazine and helped launch New West, New York magazine’s West Coast sister publication, in 1976. New West’s first cover sported a caricature of Gov. Jerry Brown by Robert Grossman, but Mr. Ziff’s real love was photography, and he brought a photographer’s eye to his art direction.

His first job was in the design department of McCall’s magazine. He stayed there for about a year before moving to CBS Records, where he designed album covers; he was nominated for a Grammy for the 1972 reissue “Bessie Smith: The Empress.”

In 1999, Mr. Ziff had a heart attack and quit art direction to focus on his photography. His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, among other institutions.

He used a 35-millimeter Leica and, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, had a knack for capturing the “decisive moment.” His Los Angeles and New York City streetscapes are love stories to each city’s architecture and street life. His work grew more intimate as he grew older and turned his camera on his family and friends.

Mr. Ziff died at 81 on Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, N.Y., on Long Island’s North Fork. In addition to his husband, Stephen Kelemen, an artist whom he met in 1979 and married in 2008, Mr. Ziff is survived by his stepchildren, Pond and Chandra Kelemen, and four grandchildren.