Focus on History

Periodically I get a guest on Behind the Shot that makes me nervous. This episode is one of those moments. Wish me luck... David Hume Kennerly is a legend. In fact, I would wager money that other 'legends' look to David Hume Kennerly as the standard by which they are judged. All of that is to say that there is no 'starting point' when trying to explain the photojournalist David Hume Kennerly. Still, the blog is here, and I have to start somewhere. Travel with me back to 1972... (insert way back machine sounds here) David was awarded the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Featured Photography, with a winning portfolio that included Ali being knocked down in the 15th round during the Ali v. Frazier “Fight of the Century,” images of the Vietnam and Cambodia wars, and refugees escaping into India from East Pakistan. David was just 25 at the time. Two years later, at just 27, he was appointed President Gerald R. Ford's Personal White House Photographer, the third person to have that job. Again, I have to stress this, by the time David was 27 he'd seen and documented more history that most of us learn in school. In the years since, David has photographed U.S. presidents from Johnson to Biden, and covered thirteen presidential campaigns. He was a Newsweek magazine contributing editor for ten years, and a contributing photographer for Time & Life and George magazines. American Photo named Kennerly “One of the 100 Most Important People in Photography.” Washingtonian Magazine called him "One of the 50 most important journalists in Washington, DC". That is David Hume Kennerly. One of the most important photographers ever, and his TedX talk has a title that really sums it up: Telling the Story in 1/60th of a Second As an author, David is just as successful. Kennerly has published several books of his work, Shooter, Photo Op, Seinoff: The Final Days of Seinfeld, Photo du Jour, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, and David Hume Kennerly On the iPhone. He was also a major contributor to the CNN 2016 book, Unprecedented: The Election that Changed Everything. His exclusive portrait of Trump is on the cover. He was executive producer of The Spymasters, a 2015 CBS/Showtime documentary about the directors of the CIA. He also produced The Presidents’ Gatekeepers, a four-hour Discovery Channel film about White House chiefs of staff.  Kennerly was nominated for a Primetime Emmy as executive producer of NBC’s, The Taking of Flight 847, and was the writer and executive producer of a two-hour NBC pilot filmed in Thailand, Shooter, starring Helen Hunt. Shooter, based on Kennerly’s Vietnam experiences, won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography. In 2019 The University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography acquired the David Hume Kennerly Archive that features almost a million images, prints, objects, memorabilia, correspondence and documents. University President Dr. Robert C. Robbins appointed Kennerly as the university’s first Presidential Scholar. When trying to pick an image for this show I lost over an hour browsing through David's site, specifically his 'Greatest Hits' gallery. The image of U.S. President Gerald Ford at the desk in the Oval Office, feet up is amazing. This was the day after he became president, August 10, 1974, and the bookshelves are empty because Nixon's things had been removed, but Ford's memorabilia had yet to arrive, due to the suddenness of the transition. The image of Mohammed Ali being knocked down in the 15th round at Madison Square Garden by Joe Frazier was part of Kennerly's Pulitzer Prize-winning portfolio. Then there was "The Hug", an image where Michelle Obama is hugging former president George W. Bush. Picking one image was hard, but with David's help we found the shot. There is a quote on David's website from James Earl Jones that wraps up David's career perfectly: “David Hume Kennerly is like Forrest Gump, except he was really there.”