By Daryl Lang

Updated November 4

Celebrity shooter A.J. Sokalner, admired by his colleagues for his quiet, passionate commitment to photography, collapsed Monday night outside an event in New York and died a short time later, according to his agency.

Sokalner was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital, said Philip Vaughan, owner of ACE Pictures. Vaughan said an emergency worker told him Sokalner had suffered a heart attack.

Sokalner collapsed minutes after entertainer Lady Gaga arrived at the ACE Awards, an event hosted by the Accessories Council at Cipriani, a restaurant on 42nd Street. He was part of a group of about 25 photographers working a rope line outside the event, according to photographers who were there.

Gaga was the big star of the night, and photographers waited inside and outside for her arrival at about 9 p.m. It was crowded. Photographer Brian Lamb says he was standing about five feet from Sokalner when he collapsed, but that he thought it was just a person fainting. "By the time I saw him, he was already blue and people were starting to give him CPR," Lamb says. Other photographers saw Sokalner strike his head on the ground as he fell, Lamb says.

Friend and fellow photographer Dennis Van Tine was inside Cipriani when he heard from another photographer that Sokalner had collapsed outside. Van Tine says he went out and saw paramedics attempt to revive Sokalner for several minutes, then load him into an ambulance. Another photographer notified Sokalner’s girlfriend. She and several photographers gathered at the hospital, where they learned Sokalner had died.

Sokalner was in his late 50s and lived in Manhattan. Vaughan says Sokalner was a hard worker who shot for ACE Pictures on a daily basis. “He was very well liked, he was very well respected,” Vaughan says. “He was a real photographer and he did it because he loved it.”

Van Tine says Sokalner studied the works of great photographers and tried to inject “pizazz” into his images, and was “one of those silent guys who goes out and shoots every day.”

“He was a cynic in the great New York tradition,” Van Tine says. “He knew what was right, he knew what was wrong, he knew who the crooks were.”

Lamb, who has known Sokalner for about 12 years, says he's had health problems before, but appeared fine earlier Monday.

Fellow celebrity photographer Brian Ach says he saw Sokalner pass out recently while working outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, where David Letterman's show is recorded. That time, according to Ach, Sokalner got back up and continue to work, brushing off the incident.

Ach calls Sokalner "a really good person." When Ach started shooting celebrity pictures four years ago, Sokalner was one of the first people in the close-knit, competitive group of New York celebrity photographers to talk to him. Ach later shot a picture of Sokalner as part of a series of portraits of celebrity photographers.

"You see these people every day, sometimes three times a day at different events," Ach says. "And you think they'll always be there."

Update: A funeral and burial will take place at 10:30 a.m. Friday, November 6 at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge, New Jersey. For more information call 732-634-2100.