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David Hume Kennerly

Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographer

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Archives for July 2016

DAVID HUME KENNERLY ARCHIVE PROJECT – Why Now?

July 29, 2016 By David Hume Kennerly Leave a Comment

Every so often, I wake up in the middle of the night from a recurring nightmare. In it, I am watching the final scene of Citizen Kane. The camera slowly glides over hundreds of boxes and crates in a giant dark warehouse, a room that stretched to infinity. Then, the lens settles on a box marked, “Kennerly photos.” I realized that this warehouse contains my life’s work and I watch helplessly as workmen lift boxes filled with images and historic records and pitch them into a roaring fire. My pictures are Rosebud.

Throughout my fifty-year career, I have pursued a relentless mission to document history in the making. With a combination of hard work, research, and a little intuition I have been able to, on numerous occasions, get myself into the room where history is being made. Often, I am the only person there other than the history makers themselves. My photographs have documented the fields of fire during the Vietnam War and the President of the United States as he ended that bitter conflict. I was ringside when Frazier dealt Mohammed Ali his first knock-out at Madison Square Garden and stepped around hundreds of dead bodies in Jonestown. I documented Reagan and Gorbachev during their historic Fireside Summit and, on election night 2000, I was with Bush and Cheney as they realized their presidential contest had ended in a tie.

East Pakistani Refugee - 1971
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MONTANA - 1982: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES NO SALES UNTIL JULY 1, 2003) President Ronald Reagan bids farewell after campaigning for a congressman 1982 Billings, M.T. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

As a young shooter, barely out of high school, I wanted people to see my pictures; not because they were cool – well, not only because they were cool – but because they revealed moments of history that otherwise would have gone unseen. I am just as driven now to document history with my camera – to peer inside closed doors, to reveal an individual’s character through a portrait or a slice of our country that might be fading away. And I am just as determined to make sure that those images realize their mission of revealing that history to future generations.

In this digital era, images have the potential to provide visceral, visual primary source historic information. They provide dynamic new ways to teach history to future generations in any region around the globe. However, photography collections are expensive and cumbersome to manage. Too often, I have seen collections destroyed, lost, or stored away in a basement or conventional analog archive never to be seen again – their historic content and educational potential lost forever.

LOS ANGELES -- 1968:  UPI Photographer David Hume Kennerly and Governor Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles, 1968, (courtesy of David Hume Kennerly)
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Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, signs the head of Newsweek photographer David Hume Kennerly during the flight to launch his presidential campaign in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
WASHINGTON -- 2008: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Hume Kennerly at the U.S. Capitol, 2008 (Courtesy dhk)

2016 marks the 50th anniversary of my career as a professional photographer. To celebrate that extraordinary milestone, I am launching the David Hume Kennerly Archive Creation Project with the objective of transforming my half-century of visual history into a cutting-edge digital educational tool that is fully searchable and available to the public for research and artistic appreciation.

Seeing this collection available to the public would be the realization of my lifelong dream for the possibilities for my collection. It is the flipside of that dark nightmare that haunts me about the many threats to these fragile historic objects. However, I know too well how real my nightmare could be and that making this dream a reality will take an all-out effort and a race against time.

Portions of my work are already housed in wonderful institutions, including the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and my White House photos at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum & Library.   And for more than a decade my wife, Rebecca Soladay Kennerly, and I have worked to make this good dream come true, investing every dollar we could to protect, organize and process my photographs and related materials.  A year ago, we hired Randa Cardwell, an extraordinary curator who had recently graduated from UCLA with a Masters Degree in Library and Information Sciences to help with this project. And my collection, spanning a half-decade and containing more than a million items, the size of a small presidential library, is a real monster – impossible to tame by us alone. Our small team is now ready to take the next big steps in helping the Kennerly Collection fulfill its potential as an historic educational resource.

Check out our work in detail at the Archive Page on Kennerly.com.

And please, SIGN UP at the bottom of the Archive Page now to follow our progress in this ambitious project. By signing up you will receive –
• project updates
• archive stories
• ways to help
• appearance dates
• exhibition information
• print sales opportunities
• early sneak peeks at photos we unearth along the way – such as this unpublished collection of images I made of a young lawyer who I first photographed at an impeachment hearing of President Richard Nixon in the House Judiciary Committee in 1974.

It’s going to be quite a journey. Would love to have you along for the ride.

Filed Under: Blog, Kennerly Archive Project

CNN Special: Covering 50 years of presidential politics by David Hume Kennerly

July 1, 2016 By David Hume Kennerly Leave a Comment

A witness to history: 50 years of presidential politics


Editor's note:
CNN has partnered with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer
David Hume Kennerly to cover the 2016 election. Kennerly has spent 50 years photographing U.S. politics. At age 27, he became the youngest chief White House photographer when he started working for President Gerald Ford. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Click on the image to read the article on CNN.

cnn

Just to prove that this older, experienced dog is still in the hunt, CNN has brought me aboard to cover the 2016 elections. This will be the 12th national contest that I’ve covered, and is my 50th year in the pro photo business. CNN is by far the biggest platform I’ve ever had for my photography, and I’m looking forward to getting started working with such a great team.

Here are some CNN facts:

• CNN’s two dozen branded networks and services are available to more than 2 billion people in more than 200 countries and territories.
• CNN has 42 editorial operations around the world and around 4,000 employees worldwide.
• CNN’s coverage is supplemented and carried by more than 1,000 affiliates worldwide.
• CNN reaches 96.2 million households in the U.S.
• CNN Digital is the number one online news destination, routinely recording more than 1.5 billion multi-platform page views each month
• CNN International reaches more than 315 million households around the world

Filed Under: Blog, Kennerly Archive Project, What's New

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David Hume Kennerly is like Forrest Gump, except he was really there.

- JAMES EARL JONES

David Kennerly once said to me, ”˜In photography everything can be taught, except how to see.' In his photographs”¦ we see people and historical events through the keen, alert eye of an eminent camera artist.

- HERMAN WOUK, / Author of “The Winds of War

Kennerly modestly refers to himself as a ”˜political photographer.' That's true, as far as it goes. But it's like calling Matthew Brady a ”˜war photographer' or Thomas Eakins a ”˜Philadelphia portrait painter.' Kennerly is as good as it gets in a craft he defined.

- HOWARD FINEMAN / Editorial director of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group

David's work is of the highest caliber, and he is one of the great American photographers. His specialty is photographing people, and nobody does it better.

- JULES & GEDEON NAUDET / Independent filmmakers and Executive Producers of Discovery Channel documentary “The Presidents Gatekeepers”

Pulitzer Prize winning photographer David Hume Kennerly's lifestyle photography used in Girl Scounts major national advertising campaigns and on the covers of our iconic Girl Scout Cookie Boxes redesign in 2012, captured the spirit and determination of the organization through his delightful portraits of our girls in action.

- MIRRA HERNANDEZ / Marketing Brand Manager Girl Scouts of the USA

Kennerly has proved to be an exceptional resource for Bank of America, specifically as the portraits he takes for us go directly to the heart and character of the people he photographs. He is also the consummate professional who delivers his work on or before any deadline that we require.

- PAMELA SEAGLE / Bank of America Senior Vice President - Enterprise Marketing

He possesses the rare ability to synthesize the heart and soul of an individual or situation into singular compelling images.

- MICHELLE NUNN / CEO Points of Light

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