For 30 years, Kennerly has used his pluck and ever-ready eye to become one of the great photographers of his generation. In 1972-at the age of 25-he won a Pulitzer Prize for his richly narrative images of the Vietnam War. After he returned stateside, President Ford asked Kennerly to be his personal photographer in the White House and on his 1976 campaign with a senator from Kansas named Bob Dole. Kennerly revisits that ground this week in NEWSWEEK with amazingly unguarded, be-hind-the-scenes shots of Dole at work on Capitol Hill–and in the early days of this, Dole’s last presidential campaign.
Kennerly is a master portraitist of power. He captures the magisterial and the mundane– from an enthusiastic Dole working a crowd in New Hampshire to the candidate’s lonely lunch atop an appliance box. In this strange political year, as the country decides who should be president at the end of the century, Kennerly will follow the campaign for NEWSWEEK as a contributing editor. Though there’s an undeniable art to his photos that few journalists achieve, Kennerly–who in the ’80s studied directing at the American Film Institute and has written and produced Emmy-nominated TV movies–says he aspires only to be a “good shooter.” But Gorbachev had it right when he called Kennerly’s work “more than photography-it is history.”
