-Mikhail Gorbachev
"Kennerly's Photo Op is an extraordinary personal journey through the last thirty years. His photographs will put you into the middle of the Vietnam war, ringside with Ali Frasier, on the spot at Jonestown, and at the core of other momentous episodes. This will sweep you through the events that shaped a generation. Photo Op is as good as being there."
-James A. Michener
"David Hume Kennerly worked professionally and discreetly behind the scenes during the Ford Administration. His pictures were insightful, dramatic and an honest record of what it was really like to be President and First Lady. His book documents that turbulent period and many other significant events in our recent history. He is both our friend and photographer-like a member of the family. Photo Op is an outstanding achievement."
-President and Mrs. Gerald R. Ford
"David Kennerly once said to me, 'In photography everything can be taught, except how to see.' In his photographs as collected in this book, we see people and historical events through the keen alert eye of an eminent camera artist."
-Herman Wouk
"Dave and his camera are witnesses of life-the grit, the humanity, the struggle and the joy. And it's all here."
-Diane Sawyer
"David is one of the best photojournalists of all time."
-Neil Leifer Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David Hume Kennerly presents a photo album for the whole American family.
The last thirty years of American history have produced a compelling range of images: Vietnam and the student protests, Robert Kennedy's assassination and Richard Nixon's election, the trauma of Watergate and the recovery under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the fragile beginnings of peace in the Middle East and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. Kennerly's astonishing photographs of these and many other events that shaped our times are among the images forever imprinted in our memories.
David Hume Kennerly was always there with his camera-on the battlefield, at ringside, or behind closed doors in the Oval Office. This eyewitness collection presents over 250 of his most dramatic photographs, many published here for the first time. Augmented by Kennerly's first-hand recollections of the historic events he witnessed, the photographs range from an early Rolling Stones concert through Jonestown, with vivid coverage of Vietnam and other wars, the final days of the Nixon Presidency, the inside workings of the Ford Administration, and groundbreaking events in international diplomacy.
As a member of the generation that has assumed leadership in America, Kennerly offers this outstanding visual record of the changing of the guard and the ascendancy of that new generation. Every photograph will trigger a memory.
