Tuesday, August 16, 2022

you'd expect someone to be famous, when they were the photographer that captured, for posterity; Nixon's "kitchen" debate with Khruschev, JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream." But I've never heard of Joe O'Donnell until now

Joe O’Donnell joined the Marines at the outbreak of World War II and got to pick between two jobs: Paratrooper or photographer.

He took official photos of Nagasaki for the military with one camera, and turned over the negatives.

In the accordion bellows of his military camera he smuggled Lucky Strike cigarettes and Hershey’s chocolate bars to use as peace offerings for the traumatized Japanese men, women and children he photographed.

 The official photographs were turned over to his superiors, never to be seen again. The US Govt was afraid to let the public see them. 

But he also took more than 300 photos of his own with a separate camera, and smuggled them back to the U.S. in boxes labeled "photographic papers." But these troubled him so greatly, he came home and locked them in a trunk until 1989. "I didn't want to deal with it," he said. "Kids with no eyes, men with no tongues trying to talk." 

After the war, O’Donnell worked as a United States Information Agency photographer assigned to document the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. In short, he was a White House photographer, he was there with FDR, Stalin and Churchill, photographing the Big Three as they decided the fate of postwar Europe. He was with Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur at Wake Island during the Korean War

His best-known images include Harry S. Truman meeting with Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, Truman with England's Queen Elizabeth, and Richard Nixon with Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev. O'Donnell captured Kennedy wrestling with whether to invade Cuba during the "Bay of Pigs" confrontation.

He would capture for the world Nixon's "kitchen" debate with Khruschev, JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream." 

He didn't dig out the atomic photos until he had a vision of what he should do with them during a visit to a religious retreat in Kentucky in the late 1980s. This led him to try to get them published. As he said: "Pictures don't lie."

He retired on disability after a car accident during a presidential motorcade

Turned down, by dozens of U.S. publishers, he got them printed in Japan (he sent me an autographed copy of the booklet), and he organized gallery showings and lectures in several other countries, starting in the mid-1990s.


But I do want to let you know that Karahara was immediately on scene to take photos of Hiroshima, https://atomicphotographers.com/photographers/yotsugi-kawahara and Troutman missed the surrender photo op on the Missouri, with up front access given to him by Gen MacArthur, to scavenge airplane fuel to get a flight from Tokyo to Hiroshima to get photos https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/story/2020-02-16/newports-stanley-troutman-went-to-war-armed-only-with-a-camera


Joe O’Donnell’s photos were displayed for the first time in Europe and Japan, and in 2005 they were put into a book published by Vanderbilt University Press, "Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine's Photographs from Ground Zero."

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