Brian Blaine Reynolds, 89, who died June 2 of kidney disease at a hospital in Herzliya, Israel, was a man with two names, two countries, and, for all practical purposes, two identities.

Under his original name of Hy Peskin, he was one of the finest sports photographers from the 1940s to the 1960s, capturing the greats of baseball, basketball, boxing, and golf in some of the most memorable images in sports history.

As Brian Reynolds, his legal name for the last 40 years of his life, he founded an organization now called the Academy of Achievement that brings together the super-accomplished for an annual gala weekend in which they rub shoulders with one another and serve as an inspiration to hundreds of students.

Although Mr. Reynolds had no active role in the academy for the past 20 years, the Washington-based organization now run by his son continues to be one of the world’s most dazzling gatherings of international celebrities – Nobel Prize winners, heads of state, star athletes, titans of industry, scientists, and entertainers.

If the dual worlds of Hy Peskin and Brian Reynolds intersected, they did so in his pursuit of people of rare mastery and renown.

As a photographer, he created some of the most remarkable images of 20th-century sport: Joe DiMaggio completing his majestic swing in the 1949 All-Star Game; a through-the-ropes view of boxer Carmen Basilio, his face bloodied and his eye swollen shut, at the moment he lands a right hand to the face of his opponent, Sugar Ray Robinson; the brooding glare of football great Jim Brown; character studies of baseball superstar Ted Williams, and perhaps the most famous golf photograph ever, Ben Hogan’s dramatic 1-iron shot on the 18th hole of the 1950 U.S. Open in Merion, Pa.

Mr. Reynolds, a self-described poor kid from Brooklyn, originally wanted to be a sportswriter and began his career during the Depression at the old New York Daily Mirror. He switched to photography when he found out he could make more money.

By the 1940s, he was freelancing for the leading magazines of the era – Time, Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post – often taking pictures from startlingly fresh angles. He said that his pictures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, sometimes shot from the roof of Ebbets Field, made both him and the Dodgers famous.

Typically using a Speed Graphic and a Rolleiflex, Peskin was credited with taking the first sports action photographs in color. His new technique landed him a job with Look magazine. In 1954, he became one of the first photographers hired by the newly formed Sports Illustrated magazine.

A few of his many covers for SI contributed to the fabled Sports Illustrated jinx. One week after his January 31, 1955, cover photograph of skier Jill Kinmont, for instance, she was paralyzed in a skiing accident.

In addition to sports, he shot magazine feature photos of writer William Faulkner, President Eisenhower, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. His favorite pictures, shot for Life magazine in 1953, were of a young John F. Kennedy sailing with his bride-to-be, Jacqueline Bouvier.

In the early 1960s, Peskin became interested in other ventures and, among other things, helped organize the World Series of Sports Fishing with Ted Williams.

By 1964, believing his Jewish name to be a liability in fundraising, he legally became known as Brian Blaine Reynolds – using the middle names of his three sons. That year, he also launched the first gathering of what became the Academy of Achievement.

Under his leadership, the academy brought together prominent people from a variety of fields – Elizabeth Taylor, Elie Wiesel, Linus Pauling, Johnny Cash, and Willie Mays, among dozens of others – to meet one another, receive awards, and talk with top high school students.

Reynolds financed the early years of his all-star academy with his photography and later received corporate donations and sold tickets to the glittering annual gatherings. His wife and children helped run the business. Over time, disputes emerged and by 1985, Reynolds’s youngest son Wayne took over managing the organization, which ended up in a legal dispute with the Smithsonian Institution in 2002.

In the late 1980s, Reynolds filed lawsuits against his sons charging they had colluded to take control of the academy from him. One California jury awarded him damages of $800,000 (later reduced to $200,000), and another granted him a monthly pension of $10,000 from the academy.

In recent years, Reynolds became known as such a litigious person, usually representing himself in court, that in 1995 a Texas television station did a story about his frequent court cases. He served time in a Texas jail for contempt of court.

After years of not touching a camera, Reynolds – using his professional name of Hy Peskin – came out of retirement to photograph a boxing match between a man and a woman for Sports Illustrated. In 2002, he was featured in an HBO documentary on sports photographers. By then, his worlds had almost completely diverged. Few people who knew him as Brian Reynolds had heard of Hy Peskin, and vice versa.

He was building a home in Israel at the time of his death.