David Hume Kennerly

The Girl with the Cap Gun and ‘Tude

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(The Girl with the Cap Gun and ‘Tude. Brooklyn, 1969)

One of the true joys of having the time to go back through my archives at a more leisurely pace is uncovering the occasional gem that was hiding away.  In this case one that has been unseen for over 50 years. I took this in my Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood in 1969, a place that was a photo-rich environment, and an area where I loved taking pictures every week-end as an escape from my regular job of taking pictures! (I love my work). This little girl was packing a pistol and an attitude to match. Her brother appeared to just be along for the ride. We know who’s the boss here, and with luck both of them are still alive and kicking.

Another undiscovered Kennerly image now discovered

Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona: David Hume Kennerly Archive.
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford

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On March 26, 2019 an exhibition of my photos will open at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is the first-ever show of my time as President Ford’s chief White House photographer and is a vivid comparison between then and how things are now.  If you are old enough to remember that period, you know it was a dark time in America’s history.

On August 9th, 1974, Richard Nixon had just resigned in disgrace, the first and only president to do so. Along with the political crisis caused by Watergate, the economy was in recession, unemployment was through the roof, and the United States was still fighting a war in Vietnam.  But there was a light at the end of that harrowing tunnel. His name was Gerald R. Ford. As Mr. Ford stepped forward under dire and extraordinary circumstances to accept the mantle of the Presidency, he told Americans hungry for straightforward and honest leadership, “our long national nightmare is over.”

That same night President Ford offered me the opportunity to be his chief presidential photographer, in effect tossing me the keys to the kingdom. He and Mrs. Ford allowed me unfettered upstairs, downstairs access to him, his family, and the inner workings of the White House.  A new and transparent era was about to begin in American politics, and I had a front-row seat to document it for history.

I photographed every major event during Mr. Ford’s time in office.  But the most important image that emerged from those thousands of photos was a close-up portrait of President Ford’s humanity. I saw a man who cared about people for who they were, not for what they appeared to be. I saw a President who was truthful, intelligent, forthright, and courageous, who was concerned about the welfare of the country, a person who was always loyal to his friends and those who worked for him. I saw a true leader and a great man.

All of those qualities were evident at one of the most personal, dramatic, and sad moments of Ford’s Presidency. Moments after President Ford publicly conceded the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, his close personal aide Terry O’Donnell and I entered the oval office. We were the only ones in there.  He put his arm around Terry, thanked him for his service, and asked if there was anything he could do for him.  I had tears in my eyes as I photographed that moment. Here was a someone who just lost the biggest prize on earth but was unselfishly thinking about how to help another person.  That’s just the way he was.  That’s why I loved the guy.

Note:  I personally selected all the photographs that will appear in the exhibition.  Some have never been seen, and each in its own way reveals the man who worked so hard to heal our nation.

Jonestown, a Personal Recollection

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Story and Photographs by David Hume Kennerly

JONESTOWN — 1978: TIME cover by David Hume Kennerly

Some anniversaries should be remembered, others you would rather forget. This one cuts both ways. Forty years ago on November 18, 1978, in a place carved out of a remote jungle in Guyana, over 900 people were murdered or committed suicide. Jonestown. A name that will live in infamy.

Time Magazine’s New York bureau chief Don Neff and I were in Miami, working on a Colombia-related drug story for the magazine that day, and word hadn’t yet reached the outside world about what happened in Guyana. Sunday morning’s edition of the Miami Herald changed all of that. The headline said that a U.S. Congressman had been shot in Guyana. Details were sketchy, but it appeared that Rep. Leo Ryan of California, some aides of his, and members of the press, had been attacked during a visit to the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Jonestown, (better known as Jonestown).  The congressman was there to investigate claims that some of his constituents were being held in Jonestown against their will, and he had gone to get them out. 

Neff and I immediately decided to head down there. Having an American Express card proved valuable, we charted a jet, put the charge on my card, and off we went to Georgetown, Guyana, a place 2,000 miles away in South America.  

When Neff and I arrived in Georgetown late Sunday, I ran into my good friend and fellow photographer Frank Johnston of the Washington Post.  He had linked up with Charles Krause of the Post who had been shot along with Ryan and the others,  but survived.  Krause was still reporting the story, he is definitely my kind of journalist! Frank briefed me on what he knew about what had unfolded, and told me some of the names of reporters who had been killed. I knew two of them, Don Harris of NBC whom I had known from when he covered President Ford a few years earlier, and Greg Robinson, a photographer for the San Francisco Examiner.

The plane which U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan was about to board when he was shot and killed in Port Kaituma, Guyana. On November 18, 1978 over 900 members of the People's Temple Cult led by Reverend Jim Jones died in Jonestown, Guyana victims of mass murder and suicide.

The following morning at a Guyanese government press conference, they announced that there had been some mass suicides, but due to poor communications it was not clear exactly what had happened.  There was even talk that there might be some Jonestown militants who would fight the government and were holding out in the area. The officials said a small press pool would be taken into up there, and rightly chose Johnston and Krause to make the trip.  

Neff and I, however, were determined to get there on our own, which proved to be a saga in its own right.

A national emergency had been declared and no unauthorized planes would be allowed to fly into the Jonestown area.  The networks all had out-of-country aircraft standing by, but the government said that no non-Guyanese pilots or planes would be allowed anywhere near the place.  Neff and I switched into high gear to try and find a pilot and an aircraft and pilot that would pass muster with the Guyanese.  And we found them. The only ones in all of Guyana, in fact, that met their requirements. 

Now we needed permission to take off and land at Port Kaituma, the nearest runway to Jonestown, the place where Leo Ryan was assassinated, and where the journalists were also killed.  We needed the information minister to green light it with the director of aviation, and after several hours of spirited conversation she agreed, except for one slight problem, she didn’t sign a letter to that effect. The aviation director was a real stickler for protocol and wanted the piece of paper. We pleaded our case with an extremely efficient secretary to the minister who signed it for us, and it worked. When we found out that we would be getting the flight we invited NBC’s Fred Francis and a cameraman along who had been unable to get their own ride. It was the least we could do for them after their colleagues were killed.

The small Cessna we rented had a few issues that we noticed when we got in it. There were bullet holes in its side and seats. Also some dried blood splattered around. The pilot told us that the damage was caused by Larry Layton, a close follower of Jim Jones, who tried to kill the passengers and him in the plane who were Jonestown defectors. One of the passengers disarmed Layton before he killed them all. This happened in Port Kaituma at the same time as the other shootings of Ryan and company.  Layton had been sitting where I was on the plane, and I stared at the bullet holes in front of me on the trip north. The pilot was a gutsy guy to go back there less than a day after the shooting, and we definitely gave him a bonus.

Larry Layton, a close follower of Jim Jones, was held by authorities on the runway at Port Kaituma.

(Layton was the only former Peoples Temple member to be tried in the United States for criminal acts relating to the murders at Jonestown. He was convicted on four different murder related counts, including conspiracy and aiding and abetting in the shootings of Congressman Ryan. He served 18 years, and was released in 2002, and to this day is the only person ever to have been held criminally responsible for the events in Guyana.)

As we winged toward the scene, the pilot said he would fly over Jonestown. We were still at a distance, but it appeared to me that there were scores of people alive and gathered around a big tin-roofed structure in the middle of what appeared to be a small village or compound. As we drew closer it turned out I was wrong.

I’ve seen a lot of shit in my life, more than two years in Vietnam covering the war guaranteed that, but nothing prepared me for the shock of what I witnessed that day.  The people who I thought were gathered around the pavilion were dead. They looked like colorfully dressed but lifeless dolls strewn along the ground, most of them facedown, many of them huddled together in groups.  There were hundreds of them.  I don’t wish that sight on anyone.

GUYANA- NOVEMBER 18: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES) On November 18, 1978 over 900 members of the People's Temple Cult led by Reverend Jim Jones died in Jonestown, Guyana victims of mass murder and suicide. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

The pilot circled a couple of times, tipping the wing so I could photograph the tableau of death, then headed to land on the dirt strip at Port Kaituma a few miles away.

The twin-engine Otter aircraft that had carried the ill-fated Congressional delegation, one of its tires shot flat, was off to the side of the runway. This was the scene of Rep. Ryan’s death, along with the murders of Don Harris, NBC cameraman Bob Brown, Greg Robinson, and temple defector Patricia Parks. Nine others were injured but survived including Jackie Spier, a Ryan aide, who is now the Congresswoman in her bosses’ old district, NBC’s Steve Sung, and San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman. The bodies and the wounded were evacuated to Georgetown before we got there.

We walked around the disabled plane, and there was still evidence of remains at the scene. We buried them by the side of the runway.

The only living thing in Jonestown after the murder/suicides that killed 909 people.

A Guyanese military helicopter gave us a lift into Jonestown, a distance of about six miles. As the chopper approached the isolated settlement, the smell of death wafted up from below. It’s something that you can’t get out of your system, it’s a unique and unsettling odor.  I fashioned a facemask from a towel that I’d brought from the hotel and sprinkled some cologne on it. It didn’t help much, the dead had been in the 100+ degree for over three days. 

As I walked among the corpses it was eerily tranquil, as if they had just gone to sleep and forgotten to wake up. Other than bloating from the heat, they were fairly intact. I was used to the wounds of war, bodies torn to bits, burned, battered, blown up. This was different. Families with their arms around each other lay face down, in some cases the little feet of their children sticking out between them. One dead child was by himself, the adults, maybe his parents, a few feet away.  It was sickening. They had deliberately murdered their kids. More than 300 of them died in that isolated outpost, a third of the 918 who perished at the whim of a monster.

The only living thing in Jonestown outside of the few Guyanese authorities surveying the site was a blue and yellow parrot perched above a small group of the dead. He seemed to be surveying the scene, and I wondered what he witnessed, and remember joking to myself, “If only he could talk.” 

I moved silently through the still life of horror, carefully stepping over bodies that were under a large pavilion, taking pictures, documenting the unspeakable, doing what I was trained to do. It wasn’t easy. 

Bodies litter the main pavilion of the People's Temple Cult in Jonestown. In the background, above Jim Jones's throne-like chair, a sign reads "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

At one the end of the building was what appeared to be a throne-like chair where Jim Jones had sat to rule his subjects. Above it was a black sign with white letters printed in capital letters:

THOSE WHO DO NOT

REMEMBER THE PAST

ARE CONDEMNED

TO REPEAT IT

The scene struck me later like the moment in Stephen King’s, “The Shining,” where novelist Jack Torrance, instead of writing his book, is typing the same thing over and over for hours on end:

        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It was then that the audience realized that Torrance was either totally mad or possessed by demons.  

Near the throne was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a microphone where Jones had exhorted his followers to commit, “revolutionary suicide,” and to take the poison that ultimately killed most of them.  It was all on audio tape, and is one of the most chilling things you will ever hear.  There is screaming and shouting in the background as he tells them,‘Stop the hysterics. This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity.’” 

Just behind the throne on a wooden walkway outside the building was a giant vat filled with a purple liquid. It was Flavor Aid, (not Kool-Aid), laced with cyanide. It is where people lined up with their cups to dip into the deadly mix. Dead bodies lay near the vat, and all around the area.  (My photo of the purple poison surrounded by the bodies was used on the cover of Time Magazine and became their biggest seller ever to that point). 

The corpse of Jim Jones had been dragged out of the pavilion and was sprawled out face up a few feet from the devil’s brew.  He had apparently been autopsied on the scene, and his abdomen was crudely stitched back together. Jones appeared to have died from a single gunshot wound to the head. On top of everything else it was an even uglier sight, but I photographed him anyway. It was his show, and thankfully the end of the play.

The pavilion in Jonestown where Jim Jones sat as he exhorted his followers to commit mass murder and "revolutionary suicide."

For this piece I reread my book Shooter to refresh my memory on this, and will quote exactly what I wrote about the aftermath:

“The wars I have covered, for all their violence and gore, have never given me nightmares. Somewhere in my subconscious is a safety valve that spares me that. Not so with Jonestown. A week after my departure I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I’d dreamed that I had walked into a room and encountered the bloated—but living—body of Jim Jones, seated on his throne. I turned to escape but found my path blocked by one of Jones’s followers, flesh dripping from his bones. I twisted into wakefulness just as a rotting hand reached for my throat.”  

I should add that I slept with the lights on for the rest of that night!

Flash forward 40 years. Time hasn’t really brought any understanding to me of why people would do such a thing. To blindly follow a crazed leader unto death, and to murder your children doing it, doesn’t make any more sense to me now than it did then. As a person who has always had a fierce streak of individuality, it’s pretty much unfathomable. As a father, I’d like to think that I’ve passed some of that  independent thinking along to my three sons. It would be my greatest gift.

Jim Jones's autopsied body on a boardwalk outside the pavilion in Jonestown where he told his people to kill themselves, on November 18, 1978. Over 900 members of the People's Temple Cult led by Jones died there. Jones died of a bullet to the head.

2016: A Campaign Like No Other

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I have photographed every presidential campaign since 1968.  Twelve of them.  The only one I didn’t cover was the election of 1972 when I was in Vietnam photographing the war. [Click below to view my Pulitzer Prize Portfolio, which includes many photos from Vietnam]

NEW YORK -- APRIL 14: Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debating at CNN Brooklyn Navy Yard Democratic Debate, New York, New York, April 14, 2016. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/GettyImages)

My fifty years of coverage doesn’t make me an expert on the presidential selection process, but it does give me a singular frame of reference. Through my camera, I’ve spotted success and failure from every angle.  I’ve documented candidates who were considered inevitable, those who seemed to appear out of nowhere and everyone in between. I’ve found that certain campaigns had their own personalities and others trudged along with a dreary sort of resignation.

However, through all those campaigns – the thousands of rallies and town hall meetings, the hundreds of victory and concession speeches, the dozens of conventions and inaugurations, I can safely say that neither I nor anyone else has ever seen anything like the Great Presidential Melee of 2016.

GREEN BAY -- OCT 17: Singer Anastasia Lee waits to sing the National Anthem at the start of a Trump campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, October 17, 2016. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/GettyImages)

My coverage started in the primary season with Hillary v. Sanders, and Trump v. Everyone Else. And, of course, the unlikely winner and current president is Donald J. Trump.  My coverage swung from 2015 where I photographed all the candidates individually, all the way through to the home stretch. I was on the Hillary Clinton plane when she first got word of FBI Director Comey’s shattering announcement about reopening the email investigation, then spent the last few days heading toward the finish line with Trump. I was in the ballroom in New York City where most people were anticipating a concession, but instead ended up with a Trump victory speech.

I’ve chosen a small sample of my Campaign 2016 photos for this gallery.  The entire collection will reside in my archive along with the rest of my campaign and political photography. Together, these collections provide a half-century continuum of images that document the peaceful transfer of power in our country. I am grateful to have taken this wild ride and am even more grateful to be able to share this collection and the entire archive with those interested in taking a close-up look at how America has chosen its leaders.



Kennerly Archive Project



Pulitzer Prize Portfolio

Introduction of Kennerly Archive Project Archivist, Randa Cardwell

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Progress Report from the Kennerly Archive

We are so fortunate to have been able to bring Randa Cardwell on to the Kennerly Archive team last year – a team that now numbers three, counting Rebecca, Randa and myself.  Randa graduated from UCLA with a Masters in Library and Information Sciences, with a subspecialty in digital and photos!  She has a fantastic instinct for pictures and doesn’t seem the least phased by the size of my monster collection.  Her skills and expertise have pushed the Kennerly Archive Project into overdrive and her judgement has allowed us to effectively sift through piles to locate and protect the gems.

Thank you, Randa!

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A Pulitzer Story

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View Pulitzer Prize Portfolio

The big announcement in the spring of 1972 came via a telex message to the United Press International office in Saigon where I was the photo bureau chief.  It read:  “01170 Saigon-Kennerly has won Pulitzer for Feature Photography, which brings congrats from all here. Now need effort some quotes from him and pinpoint his location when advised for sidebar story, Brannan/NXCables.”

I didn’t believe it.  How could I have won my profession’s highest award and not even known I had been entered? I thought it was a mistake or, worse, a prank. Bert Okuley, the news chief at the Saigon bureau, fired back a note. “EXHSG Brannan’s 01170. Are you kidding? If so it isn’t much of a joke. Is there a Pulitzer awarded to a UNIPRESS photographer, and is it Kennerly? Okuley”

Muhammad Ali knocked down in 15th Round by Joe Frazier, Madison Sq. Garden

Then the wire machine broke down.  It wasn’t possible in those days just to pick up the phone and call the states.  For three hours we were cut off from the world. Without warning the telex sprung back to life, and a torrent of messages flooded forth. The first said, “01181 Okuley’s 02054 No kidding and can you reach Kennerly for sudden comment need to know where he was when he got the news, Wood/NXCables”

My favorite cable was from my Associated Press competitor Eddie Adams who won a Pulitzer for his famous photo of the chief of the Vietnamese National Police shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head. Before I left for Southeast Asia Eddie told me that I was wasting my time, and rather immodestly suggested that, “All the good photos in Vietnam had been taken.” His message to me after I won simply said,

“I was wrong.  Congratulations. Eddie.”

So, no joke, I had just joined the Pulitzer Club.

Weeks later I saw the official citation: “For an outstanding example of feature photography, awarded to David Hume Kennerly of United Press International for his dramatic pictures of the Vietnam War in 1971.” It also noted that, “he specializes in pictures that capture the loneliness and desolation of war.” The representative photo from the portfolio, (not knowing a portfolio was entered, I had no idea what was in it), was a photo that I had taken of an American soldier walking across a shattered hillside near the A Shau Valley up in the mountains outside of Hue.  It definitely fit the lonely, desolate, and dangerous bill.

What I found out later is that Larry DeSantis, chief photo editor for UPI, and a man whose laser-guided criticism had helped to make me a better photographer, had submitted me for the Pulitzer. During 1971, as photos of mine that he liked came across his desk, Larry would toss copies into the drawer. At the end of the year he scooped them up and entered them in the contest, underscoring how we can’t always make it on our own, but need some help and faith from others along the way. Larry’s gone now, but before he left I had the chance to tell him that he was the greatest photo editor on earth. I also told him that it was our award, not just mine.

Years later I visited the Pulitzer archive at Columbia University in New York to see for myself what pictures had won.  I discovered that my portfolio contained eleven photographs. Included was a single color photo taken at a little firebase named LZ Lonely that was similar to a black and white picture of the same situation, and to my knowledge is the first color photo that was part of a winning Pulitzer entry. To my surprise there was also a photo from the Ali-Frazier, “Fight of the Century,” in Madison Square Garden taken on March 8, 1971. That picture, in the 15th round of the world heavyweight title bout, showed Mohammad Ali in mid air falling to the canvas after being walloped by a vicious Joe Frazier left hook. The fight was my last domestic assignment before I left to cover the war in Vietnam, and that picture appeared on dozens of front pages around the world the next day, including the New York Times, (that also happened to be my 24th birthday). The other photos were from Vietnam, Cambodia, and of refugees in India who had escaped from East Pakistan. It was a wide and inclusive array of my year in pictures.

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The Feature Photography prize debuted in 1968 when the Pulitzer board split photography into two categories, Feature and Spot News. Spot News became Breaking News in 2000. The Feature category was created for a single photo, essays, or in my case a portfolio of pictures taken during a calendar year. The award was principally designed for professional photographers.

The first winner in the Feature category was my late friend and colleague Toshio Sakai who won for Vietnam coverage in 1968. The Spot/Breaking News category has contained some astonishing and memorable images over the years.  Three of the best ever are Joe Rosenthal’s Marines raising the flag atop Mount Surabachi on Iwo Jima, Nick Ut’s napalmed Vietnamese girl running down the road, and of course Eddie’s Saigon execution photo.  I was happy and honored to join the ranks of these great photographers.

SaigonExecution_EddieAdams

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NickUtPP

But that isn’t the end of the saga of my Pulitzer-winning pictures. The rest of it illustrates how valuable, and in many cases vulnerable, photography can be.

All the images I made for UPI resided in their files. Somehow the original negative for the GI traversing the devastated hill went missing, and was never found. To this day I don’t have an original print of that photo, but fortunately have an excellent copy from a print made at the time.

A common practice at UPI was to cut the strip of 36 black and white negatives into sections of three frames each, usually keeping the selected image in the middle with a photo on each side. That was done to allow the more modern 35mm film to fit into yellow envelopes that were designed to accommodate the 4 x 5-inch negatives shot during an earlier era. Astonishingly UPI chucked the other negatives. In other words 90 percent or more of the images I shot during my five years as a UPI photographer were discarded, including at least a year and a half’s worth of Vietnam pictures. It was heartbreaking.

Photojournalism is a hybrid form. Early news photography was used mainly to illustrate the written stories. Pictures were not always seen as news documents in their own right. For decades, bulky negatives and prints were disposed of in stunning quantities. To cite just one example, several years of photographs of events covered by The Washington Post’s excellent photographers, including classic images from the Watergate hearings and the White House, were trashed by a zealous bean counter. To save space.

This year, I’ve embarked on a mission to prevent that from happening to me. I hope to collect, preserve and scan my entire collection. For 12 years, my wife Rebecca and I have been pulling together and organizing everything I have shot, written and collected, during my 50-year career as a professional photographer, (and the archive continues to grow, I’m still out there shooting!).

The images I’ve made are not just pictures to me. Each one represents a sliver of my soul. I’ve seen joy and sorrow, horror and heroism, triumph and defeat. I have witnessed and documented the human experience at its worst and best. It has been my mission to tell those stories.  The pictures I took in 1971 that won the ’72 Pulitzer were deeply meaningful to me. They encompassed a galaxy of human emotions and conditions.  It’s hard to imagine that I was in four different war zones that year. Sure, it took a personal toll, but nothing like the price the participants pay, particularly innocent children and civilians. I do it for them.

I will always be grateful to the Pulitzer committee for selecting my work as worthy of our profession’s highest honor. It not only acknowledged me, but all of the other photographers from conflicts past and present. Many of them died in pursuit of showing the truth of what war is really about. I will never forget them, and the impact they made on the world.

On this day 42 years ago… August 9th

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I remember August 9, 1974 less as the day President Richard Nixon left the presidency, but as the day Gerald R. Ford assumed it.

The morning started on the South Lawn of the White House where I was assigned by TIME Magazine to photograph one of the most dramatic events in U.S. history. This was the first time any U.S. president had resigned, and the national was reeling. From the moment Nixon stepped onto the first step of his helicopter, glanced up for the last time at the Truman Balcony, waved his arms with the familiar “V” sign, then disappeared inside Marine One, only ten seconds had elapsed. I caught every one of them. As the film ratcheted through my camera I only had one thought on my mind, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing, and I don’t want to miss a moment of the spectacle.” I didn’t. In fact with my motor drive cranking I freeze-framed 17 exposures of the historic scene.

As Nixon’s helicopter lifted off I trained my lens on Vice President and Mrs. Ford. They stood next to David and Julie Eisenhower, Nixon’s daughter and son-in- law as they watched him recede into the distance. A White House butler completed the tableau.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- AUG 9: A somber President Gerald R. Ford addresses the nation from the East Room in the White House shortly after being sworn in as the nation's 38th Chief Executive after the resignation of Richard Nixon, August 9, 1974. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

 

A short time later, at high noon in the East Room of the White House, Gerald R. Ford was sworn as the 38 th President of the United States by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. President Ford then declared our long national nightmare over. I caught that moment. He looked not only grim, but also resolved to deal with what lay ahead.

That evening I was invited to the Ford’s modest home in Alexandria. After the other guests left the president wanted to talk to me about becoming his chief White House photographer. The next day I became the third civilian to ever have that job.

DAVID HUME KENNERLY ARCHIVE PROJECT – Why Now?

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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 –
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• 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.

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

By

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.

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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