Find Something Interesting in People, Always!

 

Photo by David Hume Kennerly

Pulitzer Prize winning photograph David Hume Kennerly spoke last Thursday at the University of Missouri and revealed that he began in photography at the age of ten by photographing his cat with a Kodak Brownie camera. Moving on from cats, he went on to a career in news photography that has bridged fifty years and allowed him to capture images of every President of the United States from LBJ to Joe Biden.

Kennerly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 based on a set of images including powerful scenes from the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Licensing restrictions prevent including any of those here, but you can find them at https://ccp.arizona.edu/kennerly/galleries/vietnam-cambodia.

President Ford by David Hume Kennerly

In 1974, he was appointed official White House photographer for Gerald Ford and was given exceptional access to the President and those who visited the President. At the end of the Ford administration, Kennerly returned to Time Magazine where he continued to photograph Presidents and other world leaders.

When asked how he manages to capture so much emotion in his images, Kennerly responded that he works to "find something interesting in people, always, and the camera shows that."

Kennerly also discussed his work in war zones and disaster areas explaining that "he and his colleagues go to the places you don't want to go to show you things you don't want to see." By doing so, he gives us a deeper understanding of what is really happening in the world.

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