Tom Palumbo. Italian name. For a time there he thought about changing it. Tom Powers, he thought, would be better perhaps. “In those days, the only thing that didn’t seem so terrible about being Italian was Frank Sinatra,” he once said. But then Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather and it hit big and Palumbo reckoned he didn’t have to be ashamed of his Italian roots any more.

Tom Palumbo. Sinatra fan, American immigrant, theatre director and photographer. The last is the man we’re interested in here. You don’t know the name? Well, maybe he wasn’t enough of an operator to be remembered. Not like his contemporary Richard Avedon. “I wasn’t ambitious the way Dick was … Dick was the shooting star at Bazaar,” Palumbo’s third wife Patricia Bosworth reports her husband saying in her introduction to Dreamer with a Thousand Thrills: Tom Palumbo the Rediscovered Photographs.