NEW YORK, NY.- Lloyd Ziff 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 New York City apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Ziff said years later.

The black-and-white portraits he took are tender and moving, almost heartbreakingly so; as James Danziger, the gallerist who showed them in 2013, said recently: “Youth is moving. They capture a moment in time just before Patti and Robert were going to explode. They both carried an aura, and Lloyd was drawn to that. They wanted to be photographed just as much as he wanted to photograph them.”

Ziff went on to serve as art director for some of the most influential and visually arresting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s, including Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveler. Mapplethorpe and Smith, of course, would find their own fame, and tragedy, when Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989. When Smith wrote of their coming-of-age in her 2010 memoir, “Just Kids,” she included a few of Ziff’s portraits.

“Although we weren’t particularly close,” Ziff said, “I believe we recognized in each other something we probably couldn’t put into words at the time.”

Ziff died Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, New York, on Long Island. He was 81.

His husband, Stephen Kelemen, confirmed the death. He said that Ziff had been in declining health.

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 Ziff’s real love was photography, and he brought a photographer’s eye to his art direction.

“There was nothing he liked more than a big, beautiful graphic photograph,” said Richard Pandiscio, longtime creative director of Interview magazine and other publications, “that one arresting picture that pulled you in.”

Ziff was always taking photographs, Annie Leibovitz, whom he met at Rolling Stone, said in an interview, “and we just connected. We would have endless discussions about photography and how big it was and how important it was. We would show each other our work all the time.

“I was inspired by him,” she added. “We would just get in the car and go places. I remember once I was staying with him in his house in Laurel Canyon and there was this mad flood, it was raining insanely, and we jumped in his Porsche and started taking pictures.”

Ziff loved cars, particularly his black Porsche 914, and car culture. He also loved magazines, as Leibovitz did, and together they would haunt the Los Feliz Newsstand, now closed, in East Hollywood, driving there in the middle of the night to leaf through the new titles coming out of New York and Europe.

“We had no money, so we couldn’t buy anything,” Leibovitz said. “We’d just stay for hours looking at all this great work by Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin.”

Ziff spent the 1970s adventuring with Los Angeles’ outsized characters. Like most of his friends, he dated Eve Babitz, whose witty, lush prose chronicled the shenanigans of the era. (She died in 2021.) He lived for a time with British-born decorator Paul Fortune in his Laurel Canyon showplace. When Ziff, along with Leibovitz; Susan Doukas, an aspiring actress; and photographer Paul Ruscha, took a road trip to Joshua Tree National Park and dropped acid, Leibovitz photographed Ziff and Doukas in a dry gully, with their long shadows, and hers, stretched out on the desert behind them.

By the end of the decade, Ziff had moved to New York, where he worked for The New York Times Magazine and then House & Garden, which he helped transform from a crafty DIY service magazine into an elegant portfolio of luxurious interiors with essays by literary lions like Elizabeth Hardwick and Rosamond Bernier.

Within a few months, however, he was reassigned to Vanity Fair, which had begun as a fizzy flapper-era title but had last published in 1936 and was being revived 47 years later by Condé Nast in a $10 million makeover overseen by Bea Feitler, the Brazilian-born designer who had worked on Harper’s Bazaar and Ms. magazine.

Feitler was a hero of Ziff’s, and when she died of cancer at 44 just before Vanity Fair’s relaunch, he was brought in to take over. Its first cover, for the June 1983 issue, was emblematic of all his work: There were no words (besides the magazine’s name), only a portrait of David Hockney’s feet, taken by the artist himself, in his canvas sneakers and mismatched socks, one yellow and one red.

“Mr. Ziff, known for a style that combines intellectual flash with a dynamic color sense,” The New York Times wrote in 1982 when his appointment was announced, “may have just the right kind of razzle to give the new Vanity Fair a bit of dazzle.”

Before Feitler died, she left a list of five photographers she had wanted to use in Vanity Fair. One of them was Sheila Metzner, who was a fine arts photographer at the time and not yet doing commercial work. Ziff was captivated by her, as Feitler had been, and sent her to photograph Jeanne Moreau. Her painterly portrait of the French actress caught the attention of Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s creative director, who then brought her to Vogue.

“We always say that Lloyd discovered me,” Metzner said, “because through all that I became a Vogue photographer.”

And like most of Ziff’s photographers, she also became a lifelong friend. They loved him for his sunny personality, but also because he let them have their heads. He trusted them to bring back something marvelous.

He sent Metzner all over the world for Condé Nast Traveler, where he was the art director and Harold Evans, a veteran British newspaper editor, was the founding editor, which made its debut in 1987. Ziff did the same with Brigitte Lacombe, a French photographer known for her classic portraits of actors and directors.

“Lloyd was absolutely exceptional because he wanted you to do what you did,” Lacombe said in an interview. “He didn’t impose his own ideas. He wanted to excel and he wanted you to excel, too.”

Lloyd Ziff was born Sept. 27, 1942, 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.

His first job was in the design department of McCall’s magazine, where he stayed 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 addition to his husband, an artist whom he met in 1979 and married in 2008, Ziff is survived by his stepchildren, Pond and Chandra Kelemen, and four grandchildren.

Among the many magazines Ziff worked at or developed in the 1990s were Travel & Leisure and Joe, a quirky but short-lived general-interest title started by Starbucks and backed by Time Inc.

In 1999, 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 New York City, among other institutions.

He used a 35 mm 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.

Ruscha said he once asked Ziff why he stayed so long in magazines. “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m only in it for my friends, so I can give them work.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.