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White House Photographers

In partnership with:
With support from: Lowell Institute
Date and time
Tuesday, December 17, 2002

National Public Radio Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg moderates this slide presentation and conversation with a number of official White House photographers who covered the Presidents, their families, and their administrations.

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Cecil W. Stoughton, who was President John F. Kennedy's White House photographer, whose photographs of JFK and his wife and children shared their personal lives with the American public, and who took the iconic photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as president aboard Air Force One in Texas after JFK's 1963 assassination, died at him home in Merritt Island, Florida. Stoughton was 88 and had been ill for some time, according to his family and friends. He struggled with a heart problem after having hip replacement surgery several years ago, according to his family. He was the personal photographer to presidents Kennedy and Johnson before the position had a formal name.
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David Hume Kennerly has been photographing history for four decades. Contributing Editor for *Newsweek Magazine*, Kennerly continues to travel the globe to produce insightful images of important historic events. His career began in Roseburg, Oregon, where he published his first picture in the high school paper when he was just 15 years old. His first official photographer jobs--as a staff photographer for *the Oregon Journal* and then *the Portland Oregonian*--led him in to a position with United Press International (UPI). Kennerly won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1972 for his remarkable photographs of the Vietnam war. After the war, Kennerly returned to the United States for *Time Magazine*, and in mid-1973 and threw himself into the domestic battles then raging in Washington. After Richard Nixon resigned, Kennerly was on the South Lawn of the White House as the soon-to-be ex-President departed. His historic photo of Nixons wave goodbye, taken when Kennerly was just 27 years old, is one of the dozens of his images that have helped define American photojournalism. In the year 2000, Kennerly traveled more than 250,000 miles to 38 states and seven countries for his fourth book, *Photo du Jour: A Picture-A-Day Journey through the First Year of the New Millennium*, published in October 2002 by the University of Texas Press.
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As the *Time* magazine White House photographer for twenty years, Diana Walker captured virtually every move of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. After starting out shooting amateur black-and-white photographs of the 1963 civil rights march at the Lincoln Memorial and President John F. Kennedy's funeral, Walker had obtained White House and Congress credentials by 1975 through freelancing for *Washington Monthly*. In 1979, she became a contract photographer for *Time*, covering First Lady Rosalyn Carter's travels and Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Walker has been recognized by the World Press, the White House News Photographers Association and the National Press Photographers Association. Her longevity as a White House photographer earned her exclusives like being the only photographer in the room when Nancy Reagan entertained Raisa Gorbachev for the first time. She also was the first photojournalist allowed to spend an entire day inside the White House with President George H. W. Bush resulting in the 1989 Time photo essay, "A Day in the Life of George Bush." Walker has also had her photographs published in *Paris Match*, *Vanity Fair*, *People*, *Life* and *New York* magazines.
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