Michel Y. TIZIOU (1942 - 1994) was a reporter photographer whom his brother Jacques based as his correspondant in Cape Canaveral from Apollo 8 to 11 after taking him for three months in the summer of 68 through all NASA Centers and Industry facilities.
The Cape Canaveral office of what was at the time "Spaceialists" and became later Jacques Tiziou News Service (JTNS) was a small appartment witn a non working window A/C. The function car was an old $500 bug and even his food budget was small, but Michel managed to make thousands of friends, to mail the best information and ship the best pictures to Paris... He often also covered the activity at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston with only one incident: blocking with his rental car the parking place in front of the entrance to the LRL (Lunar Receiving Laboratory) where the truck bringing the Apollo 11 rocks was to park...
Dr. Wernher von Braun said there where only 3 photographers able to take excellent original pics of his Saturn V Moon rocket. Michel was among the three. He later said that his favorite was the one Michel took in June 69 from the LUT on pad 39A that made a full double pages in "Paris Match".
On the day when Mike Collins restarted the Apollo 11 Service Module engine to bring Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back to Earth, All the directors of all NASA Centers came to a Press Conference in the big auditorium. Dr von Braun was among the last to arrive on the stage. He looked at the first row and walked down the steps to come shake hands with Michel and Jacques Tiziou, before he returned up the stage to sit with the others...
After he returned to France, after the Apollo 11 parade in New York, Michel Tiziou started his own photography business in Paris, got married, had a son, but died very young of cancer at age 51.
In 2015, A couple volumes done by J.L. Pickering and John Bisney for the University of New Mexico about the 15 first years of Americans in Space was to contain several of his pictures....