In the Room: Sixty Years on the Front Lines of History

Some people read about history. David Hume Kennerly has spent sixty years standing in the middle of it, camera raised.

He was on the battlefields of Vietnam. He was in the West Wing. He was on the tarmac, in the motorcade, backstage, and in the room where the decisions got made — often the only photographer close enough to catch the moment a leader's face gave something away. Since 1966, his camera has been present at the moments that shaped modern America.

At 25, he became one of the youngest winners of the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his coverage of the Vietnam and Cambodian wars, refugees in India, and the Ali-Frazier "Fight of the Century." Two years later, he was appointed President Gerald R. Ford's personal White House photographer — a job that put him a few feet from the presidency, every day, for years. 

What followed is a résumé that reads like a table of contents for the last half-century. Kennerly has photographed eleven U.S. presidents, covered twelve presidential campaigns, and documented history in more than a hundred countries. His photographs have appeared on dozens of major magazine covers, and his work has run in Time, Life, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair. His archive is now housed at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, where he is the university's first presidential scholar.

Great photographs can look inevitable. They almost never are.

This exhibition goes behind the images to show the working life that made them possible. On view alongside the photographs: the camera Kennerly carried, the press passes that got him past the rope line, and the mementos he kept from a life spent on assignment. Together they turn an iconic image back into what it was in the moment it was taken — a working photographer, a tight deadline, and a fraction of a second to get it right.

It's the closest most people will ever come to standing where he stood.

Theodore Roosevelt understood the power of showing up. He wrote his own history as he lived it, and he believed the credit belonged to the person actually in the arena — not the spectator in the stands. There is a natural kinship between that idea and a photographer who has spent his career refusing to watch history from a safe distance.

This is the Library's first guest exhibition, and it arrives at a fitting moment. Kennerly's companion book is published as America marks its 250th birthday — making the Badlands, the birthplace of Roosevelt's own strenuous life, a fitting place to reflect on the American century Kennerly captured.

The exhibition accompanies Kennerly's new book, In the Room: Sixty Years on the Front Lines of History. Published by Rizzoli, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham, it gathers his most iconic images into a single narrative of the modern American experience. The book coincides with this exhibition of his work at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.