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David Hume Kennerly

Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographer

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Rebecca Kennerly

Creating an Archive and Thank You

October 15, 2019 By Rebecca Kennerly

I first met David Hume Kennerly in 1993. A year later, we were married in Hanoi, Vietnam on March 30, 1994. About two weeks after we met, David asked me to look at images he was considering including in his 1995 book, Photo Op. My dad and uncle were both photographers, so I was intrigued. I didn’t know that he was an important photographer, yet. In fact, I didn’t figure out just how important until about two years after we were married.

David’s studio was in a shabby temporary rental in a storefront on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Anyone familiar with LA knows that neighborhood it is one of the least glamorous in LA. But when I stepped into that space with photos pasted up on the walls and strewn across the floor, I was stopped cold. These were the images that taught me how to understand my past. The very images. The actual ones. I thought he might have ripped them out of books. But when I understood that he had actually made these photos himself – when it hit me that he put himself into the middle of some of the hottest hot spots in the world to help people like me understand these historic events - I became overwhelmed. I had a hard time catching my breath. Such is the power of David’s images that brought my whole past back to me in a single breathtaking moment.

On Friday, October 11, 2019, The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona officially announced that it had acquired the David Hume Kennerly Archive. The announcement rolled out with an inspired celebration that included an exhibition David Hume Kennerly: Witness to History at the university’s administration building, Old Main, that will run through the end of the year, as well as a pop-up exhibition that dotted the campus mall during Family Weekend. The Center also published a mini Kennerly Archive website to put the collection in an academic perspective and made more than 100 Kennerly images instantly available online. The celebration culminated with In the Room, presented by Bank of America, an event that paired Kennerly with fellow Pulitzer prize-winner and former Newsweek Magazine colleague, Jon Meacham, for an in-depth look at photography and history.

Jon Meacham, David Hume Kennerly. Photo by Byron Kennerly
Jon Meacham, David Hume Kennerly. Photo by Byron Kennerly

However, the journey from that afternoon in which David’s particular genius for capturing truth in 1/500th of a second took my breath away, and this week’s acquisition announcement, required decades of hard work from a small army of dedicated professionals and visionaries. One early visionary was Dr. John Schaefer, then President of the University of Arizona and co-founder of the Center for Creative Photography with Ansel Adams. He first asked David to bring his archive to the CCP in 1979, more 40-years ago. The next mention of this idea came up a mere 38-years later. David and I were in conversations with several universities about a possible acquisition of David’s archive. Alan Siegel, the visionary branding guru and good friend suggested to CCP’s chief curator and, then interim director, Becky Senf that she take a look at David’s work. Shortly afterwards, she came to our place in Santa Monica  to view the collection and expressed real interest. David and I worked with Becky and, later, CCP’s Meg Hagyard to figure out how to structure a partnership with the CCP. David had always wanted his archive to be a vibrant well-utilized educational resource. Too often photographic archives are packed up in boxes that may be safely stored, but often rarely accessed. So, Meg organized a meeting with Dr. JP Jones, the dean of UA’s College of Social & Behavioral sciences who quickly saw the educational possibilities contained in David’s photos of historic events. Later, Annie Breckenridge Barrett came on board as Director of the Center. Her bold and powerful vision aligned with that of incoming University of Arizona president, Dr. Robert Robbins. Both were committed to pairing the resources in David’s archive with U of A’s extraordinary academic resources to build an incredibly powerful educational resource to serve future generations.

However, before David’s body of work could be shown or described, it had to be gathered, organized and documented. It had to be transformed from a massive collection into a digestible archive. That’s where the small army comes in. David and I were so moved that so many of those people who helped create the David Hume Kennerly Archive traveled from far distances to attend the announcement celebration on October 11. We were so grateful that Sandra Eisert, David’s photo editor during his tenure as chief White House photographer, could attend. Dear friends like Charles and Christine Jennings also traveled to attend. Sometimes, it took encouragement from good friends to keep us going when the task felt impossible. Colleagues Pam Seagle and Larry Dirita from Bank of America flew in from the East Coast. David’s ten-year relationship with Bank of America has not only been professionally rewarding, but has allowed us to continue to invest in the David Hume Kennerly Archive. Without that support, I don’t think this archive would exist. And Jim Hornstein, our brilliant and loving attorney who helped us craft the archive structure was also there with his wife Victoria, as was the most wonderful Bob Ahern, who has helped the world see David’s images through his work as the Director of Archives at Getty Images. Jon Moeller and Hugh Millstein, whose company, Digital Fusion in LA created the exhibit prints that now hang in Old Main on the U of A campus. And a huge, huge thank you has to go to Connie Grazia, Nadine Licosti, and Maureen Sternin of Red Thread Productions who produced the In the Room event. Bravo! Most importantly, our incredible archivist, Randa Cardwell was able to attend. Randa came on board almost five years ago and has worked tirelessly to make help us make the intangible tangible. She was provided skillful support from Truman Lusson and Jessica Chappe. And we were so pleased that our three beautiful boys could join us in Tucson for the announcement. Byron, Nick, and James have never known a world without the archive, and I’ve sometimes wondered whether they thought of it like a greedy younger sibling.

David Hume Kennerly Celebrates at CCP. Photo by Byron Kennerly
David Hume Kennerly Celebrates at CCP. Photo by Byron Kennerly

In addition to the wonderful people who were able to join us at the announcement celebration, a few important contributors to the archive could not. David’s master printer, Dave Healy, whose work is the crown jewel within the fine print collection. Also, our irascible tech guru Ben Levy, who planted the concept of an archive in my head more than twenty years ago and who encouraged us to take risks with a crazy new concept called digital asset management. And finally, Alan Siegel, who had that first conversation about the archive with Becky Senf.

However, amidst the celebration, my heart is also heavy, thinking of the important photographic archives that aren’t. Too many photographers have lost their images or have had them snatched away. Too many priceless records of history have been forever destroyed or abandoned or forgotten in the face of the enormous effort and cost to manage these fragile treasures.

David and I are so very fortunate to be surrounded by so many visionaries who helped us carve out a path for this archive that simply didn’t exist before. To those who were able to celebrate with us, those who could not, and especially to those many talented and dedicated professionals at the Center for Creative Photography, we extend our heartfelt thanks. The work of helping those today understand the world of yesterday is so very important. But taking up that task with a medium that is so delicate and complex and beautiful as photography is a true calling. Thank you, Bobby, Annie, Meg, Becky, and everyone at CCP for taking up that calling. We are honored to partner with you.

Filed Under: Blog

In The Room with David Hume Kennerly, featuring Jon Meacham

October 11, 2019 By Rebecca Kennerly

Filed Under: Appearances

Images from the Front Lines of History

April 28, 2019 By Rebecca Kennerly

An Afternoon with David Hume Kennerly: Images from the Front Lines of History
Please join us for light bites, cocktails and conversation with
UA President Dr. Robbins, as well as a presentation by Pulitzer
Prize-winning photographer and the first-ever UA
Presidential Scholar David Hume Kennerly.

RSVP by April 8 | 520-621-1863 | register.uafoundation.org/kennerly/

Date:
Sunday, April 28, 2019
4 to 6 p.m.

Location:
Venue 66
10506 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025

Filed Under: Appearances

Presentation by Presidential Scholar David Hume Kennerly

April 11, 2019 By Rebecca Kennerly

Presentation by Presidential Scholar David Hume Kennerly

“The Center is excited to welcome Presidential Scholar David Hume Kennerly for a presentation on his career in photojournalism, including special focus on his body of work on Senator John McCain. The presentation will be followed by a conversation between Kennerly and Center Chief Curator Dr. Rebecca Senf.” -CCP

More information on the CCP’s website here.

Date:
Thursday, April 11th, 2019
6 p.m.
Location:
The Center for Creative Photography
1030 N Olive Rd, Tucson, AZ 85719

Filed Under: Appearances

Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford

March 25, 2019 By Rebecca Kennerly

Extraordinary Circumstances
An exhibition of photography by President Gerald Ford’s personal White House photographer, David Hume Kennerly, who personally selected each image, creating what he calls “a close-up portrait of President Ford’s humanity.”

Date:
March 25th, 2019

Location:
Gerald R. Ford Museum
303 Pearl St., NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49504

Filed Under: Appearances

David Hume Kennerly named University of Arizona’s First Presidential Scholar

October 4, 2018 By Rebecca Kennerly

Prolific political photographer David Hume Kennerly has been appointed as the first University of Arizona presidential scholar by President Robert Robbins, the school announced Tuesday.

Kennerly won the Pulitzer Prize at 25 for his documentation of the Vietnam War and served as chief White House photographer for President Gerald Ford, among many other titles.

The unpaid, honorary appointment highlights the university’s drive to support the arts, humanities and social sciences, which are critical to success in the global economy, according to university officials.

Kennerly will work with the UA’s Center for Creative Photography, located on campus at 1030 N. Olive Road, to develop a series of lectures and events for students and the community that draw on his 60 years of experience.


David Hume Kennerly has photographed every president since Richard Nixon. Here are George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

 

“How wonderful for students to hear a lecture where David (Kennerly) is the one actually talking about the contextual history of his photographs,” said Anne Breckenridge Barrett, the center’s director.

His résumé includes capturing images from 12 presidential campaigns, every president since Richard Nixon, several wars and many other significant moments in history. He was close friends with world-renowned photographer Ansel Adams, who co-founded the UA center.

With this appointment, Robbins “is recognizing visual history as a key element in teaching where we’ve been as a country and society, where we are today and where we are heading,” Kennerly said in a statement prepared by the UA. “Pairing the Center for Creative Photography with the university’s courses in arts, social sciences and humanities will produce informative, entertaining and unique programming and lectures.”


President Gerald Ford prepares to take a picture of David Hume Kennerly, 27, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer in the White House Oval Office in Washington, Aug. 11, 1974. Ford named Kennerly as official White House photographer. Kennerly left his assignment with Time Magazine to replace Ollie Atkins in the post. (AP Photo/Charles Harrity)

“We’re thrilled at the center to have his partnership and contribution,” Barrett said.

“It’s a very good indicator of the university’s belief in the center and ability of visuals to connect us all.”

View Kennerly’s portfolio at kennerly.com

The original article written and released by Mikayla Mace of the Arizona Daily Star can be viewed here!

Filed Under: Blog

News from the David Hume Kennerly Archive

May 4, 2017 By Rebecca Kennerly

Kennerly Archive

This month marks the two-year anniversary of our full-time push to turn David’s extraordinary collection of images documenting 50 years of American and world history and culture in to a living archive.  My husband, David and I, made the commitment in May of 2015 to focus our full attention and resources to this mammoth project.  We hired the incomparable archivist, Randa Cardwell to help guide the project and together we have turned this spectacular collection into an archive that tells the story of a generation.

But even though we launched the project officially, David and I have worked at gathering and organizing the historic contents of his life’s work for nearly two decades. This project has been all-consuming, rewarding and powerful.  We have unearthed many clues about who we are as a generation and how we got to where we are today.  David and I are excited that these wonderful photographs and treasures might soon be available to future generations for study, research and appreciation.

While this project has been fantastically rewarding, it has also been difficult and expensive.  To help fund our work, we created a portfolio of the eleven images that comprised his 1972 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Feature Photography.  These images had never been able to be presented together before now.  In fact, the portfolio only exists today because of the work we’ve done on the archive.

David Kennerly

Since the portfolio was made possible by the Archive Project work, we decided to set aside the first ten portfolios in the edition of 50 to help fund the completion of this important project.  Only three remain for purchase and they are only available through this private offering.

Please contact me for more information about acquiring the David Hume Kennerly Pulitzer Prize Portfolio and helping us complete this important project.


View Pulitzer Portfolio

Filed Under: Blog, Kennerly Archive Project

It Started With A Flood In The Basement

October 13, 2016 By Rebecca Kennerly

(image above is not the Kennerlys, but illustrate the dilemma)

Most photo collections don’t start with a flood; they end that way. And, of course, the David Hume Kennerly collection didn’t actually start with the flood, but my role in it did.

At the time of the flood, David and I had been married for less than two years. I was a busy screenwriter, David was a freelancer and we had a one-year-old son, Nick. On a Saturday morning in late 1995, with David out of town on a project, I was taking our baby son on an outing to a museum. As I backed the car out of our garage, I saw water seeping into the garage from its adjacent store room. I remember pausing for a second, trying to convince myself that the flow could have been normal, but of course, I knew it was not. I stopped the car and checked the storeroom to see that a pipe had broken pouring water over a wall stacked high with boxes. I knew the boxes were David’s, but had no idea what they contained. With our son safely strapped into his car seat, I was able to find the control for that pipe and turn off the water. Then, I got into the car and started to back out again, determined to take the baby to the museum for the day. I tried to convince myself that leaving the boxes in the garage until David returned would be fine. However, once again hit the brakes.

Calling someone on the road wasn't that easy back then. I had to go back into the house to use the land line in hopes that David was near his cell phone which, in those days, were still nearly the size of a brick. Once I contacted him, he confirmed what I had feared. Those soaked boxes were filled with his original negatives, slides and prints.

The baby had been crying for half an hour already while I kept him strapped into his car seat as I struggled with the broken pipe and then called his dad, so I figured he couldn’t be any more upset if made him sit a bit longer. It took me another 30 minutes to move the dozen or so sopping wet boxes into the back of the car.

I immediately drove the boxes to the other side of LA, to Arnaud Gregori’s wonderful Paris Photo Lab, where David had all of his film and printing work done at the time. I spent the next few hours working with staff at the lab to quickly pull apart the contents of the boxes and move the original material into water. In the end, that quick work saved nearly all of the negatives and transparencies and even some of the prints. However, had David not been immediately reachable or if I hadn’t seen the water pooling out from under the store-room door, or had the flood happened on Sunday when the lab was closed rather than on Saturday, all of that material would have been destroyed – lost forever. These slides and negatives came from a dozen years of work at Time magazine and contained stunning images of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, rare images of China and so much more.

When David was a very young shooter working for the Oregon Journal and The Oregonian, he controlled most of his film. So, he always kept boxes of negatives and caption envelopes stored somewhere in his house. Whenever he moved, his film moved with him. In 1967, he started shooting for UPI where he stayed through 1972, shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize. After UPI, he went to work for TIME for a few years before he went into the White House. David left the White House in 1977 and worked steadily for TIME, Newsweek and other publications.

When I met David in 1992, he would have worked as an independent contractor for sixteen years, with just two significant breaks. So, where were all of those slides and negatives from those sixteen years, I wondered? Why were there just a few boxes in the basement? After the flood, I got schooled very quickly about how the magazine business managed picture sales and how completely the publications and the agencies controlled the physical media that the photographers produced – and, in fact owned.

In 1990, David had contacted the agencies he had worked for to get his prints and negatives returned to him so that he could start work on a retrospective book project (that would ultimately become Photo Op in 1995, published by the University of Texas Press). Up until that point, he had just those ten or so boxes that travelled with him, and were occasionally augmented by sporadic agency returns. However, the rest of his hundreds of thousands of original slides and negatives were still in the hands of the magazines and agencies with which he had worked for so many years and decades. In those analog days, photo agencies, whose business models were built on the regular licensing of images, had to send slides, negatives and prints all over the world for review, publication and possible loss. The integrity of photographer’s material was left at the mercy of agency and publication mergers and changes in ownership with haphazard record-keeping and tragically high loss rates. So the rest of David’s pictures, I came to understand, were still at large.

Since the flood in the basement, I have worked continuously with David to recover those slides and negatives. It was difficult, almost detective-like work, which has resulted in hundreds of thousand negatives, transparencies and prints being returned from magazines and agencies around the world. However, simply collecting the physical material didn’t mean that the images could be easily accessed. Even making the investment to keep all of that material safe and protected represented nothing more than a good first start.

And then, when we were looking around for enough space to store the hundreds of boxes of returns, David started shooting digital, which introduced hundreds of thousands of additional images into the collection. We were swimming in a sea of images and realized that a huge additional investment needed to be made order to fulfil David’s wish for his images to become an ongoing and accessible resource for the understanding of history.

In 1998, David and I realized a small financial windfall. Instead of saving those funds for our kids’ college educations (which, with two kids now in college, sure feels like it might have been the wiser choice), we invested that money into organizing David’s photo collection. We purchased hardware to store the vast digital library. I researched best practices in the digital asset management arena and established a program specifically for this collection. To date, we have more than 400,000 digital images moving through our digital management pipeline. We also hired photo editors over the years to work with David to cull some of the best images out of the collection for digital processing, and additional staff to scan, caption and catalogue digital images into our digital asset management program. We have created nearly 50,000 scans from original analog media, all of which has wended its way through our management protocols and now lives in our digital library. Of course, with technological changes, we have had to continually upgrade hardware and software as well as adjust our management processes.

Sadly, we had to suspend our operations altogether after the financial crash in 2007 and if it hadn’t been for the ingenuity of our tech guru, Benjamin Levy, who helped us keep our server and digital storage limping along when we couldn’t afford upgrades, we might have lost the collection altogether.

Last year, David and I made the commitment of marking the 50th anniversary of his astonishing career by launching the David Hume Kennerly Archive Project. I am proud of the work we’ve done together to protect this historically important collection. We’ve come a long, long way since that flood in the basement, and we keep going because of a shared commitment to transform David’s rare and historically significant collection into a vibrant archive that can provide an invaluable educational resource to future generations.

Filed Under: Blog, Kennerly Archive Project

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