David Hume Kennerly — In the Room: 60 Years on the Front Lines of History

Photographs by David Hume Kennerly · Opening October 2026

In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt stood on a granite ledge at Yosemite next to John Muir and let a photographer make the picture. He knew exactly what he was doing. Roosevelt was among the first American presidents to understand that a photograph could carry an idea further than a speech — and he was photographed more than any president before him: on horseback in the Badlands, in the field with a rifle, on the stump, at his desk, surrounded by his children.

David Hume Kennerly picked up that thread and carried it for sixty years.

He was in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel when Robert Kennedy was shot. He photographed the war in Vietnam, and won the Pulitzer Prize for it. At twenty-nine he became Chief Official White House Photographer for President Gerald R. Ford, with the run of the building and instructions to document everything. He has been photographing presidents ever since — through resignations, summits, campaigns, recounts, and the morning the Pentagon burned.

This special exhibition draws on In the Room: 60 Years on the Front Lines of History, Kennerly's new book from Rizzoli. The photographs are not about any one administration. They are about what the job looks like at close range — the waiting, the arguing, the exhaustion, the moment before the decision — and about a country watching itself change.

It is a fitting thing to hang in a building named for the president who first grasped what a picture could do.

Admission
Included with general admission. Free for Members. Exhibition-only admission is $10.