KEY POINTS:
Arnold Hardy, an amateur photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his gripping 1946 photo of a woman falling from a burning hotel, has died at 85, two days before the 61st anniversary of the 1946 fire at Atlanta's Winecoff Hotel that killed 119 people, more than any other hotel fire in US history.
Hardy was a 24-year-old graduate student and amateur photographer when he took the photo, using his last flashbulb to capture the image in the darkness.
It shows the woman falling feet first, her skirt flying up and her white underpants stark against the hotel. He sold the photo to Associated Press and it became the defining image of the fire. The woman in the photo, Daisy McCumber, survived the fall but never wanted to talk about it.
Hardy turned down a job at Associated Press, instead founding an X-ray equipment business. He once said that after the fire the only photos he took were of family and vacations.
