The photographer Jacques Lowe was 28 years old when he took his first shot of a Massachusetts Senator named John F. Kennedy and his young family. Beginning with a 1958 photo session at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., Lowe would go on to take more than 40,000 images of Kennedy and his family on the campaign trail, at home, and in the White House. It was Lowe’s camera that brought Camelot to the world.
Lowe’s photos were printed in publications around the world. In his later years, he stored the original negatives in a vault at the World Trade Center in New York. Those negatives were lost in the wreckage on 9/11. Fortunately, Lowe’s family held on to many of his contact sheets in a different location.
Seventy images from those sheets form the basis of Creating Camelot, one of two new exhibits about the life and death of the United States’ 35th president that opened this week at the Newseum. For Creating Camelot, the Newseum’s staff scanned the original contact sheets, sifted through thousands of images, and digitally restored the selected photos. Tools like Adobe Photoshop were necessary to clean up the photos after a half-century’s worth of being stapled, folded, and filed away in boxes, says Indira Williams Babic, who oversaw the restoration work.
Beginning in May 2012, Babic and her team spent a collective 600 hours going through Lowe’s photos, removing marks left by staples and creases, and freshening up the vividness and overall quality of the shots. Babic notes that it wasn’t airbrushing, the aim was to preserve the “vision of the original photojournalist.”
While the display of Lowe’s chronicles evoke American optimism at the dawn of the 1960s, the other new exhibit tackles the grim side of the Kennedy years. On the Newseum’s sixth floor is Three Shots Were Fired, an exhibit named for the the lede jolted out by Merriman Smith, a United Press International correspondent who was the first to report news of the attack on Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas.
Smith’s portable typewriter, and other tools used by journalists covering Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s fateful trip to Dallas, are on display, as are the personal effects of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The red checked shirt and white jacket Oswald was wearing when he was arrested are on public view for the first time ever, on loan from the National Archives and Records Administration. So is Oswald’s wallet, along with its contents—photos of his wife and his military identification cards—splotched with what might look like blood, but is actually residue from fingerprinting chemicals.
Also featured in the exhibit is perhaps the most famous device used to record that awful day, Abraham Zapruder’s eight-millimeter camera. Alongside Zapruder’s camera is the montage Life composed from his footage in its issue covering Kennedy’s death, and the $150,000 contract the Dallas businessman signed with the magazine.
Creating Camelot and Three Shots Were Fired are on display through next January, as is an accompanying documentary, A Thousand Days, about the Kennedys’ time in the White House.
At the Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW; (202) 292-6100. Admission $13 children, $18 seniors, $22 adults 19-64.
