Stearns, now a freelancer, worries that despite the Times’ correction, the link made between O’Donnell and his photo could hurt his business. On his Web site www.ssphotography.com the John-John salute is displayed prominently on the home page.
“All I ever had was my name (on that image),” he says. “So many people come to my business because of that picture. Some people hire me only for that picture for bragging rights.”
As it turned out, the John-John photo mess was just the top layer of an onion waiting to be peeled. The following are stories O’Donnell told or photos he attributed to himself, some so obviously bizarre as to support the dementia argument:
The decline of O’Donnell’s health in the last decade or so of his life make unraveling fact from fiction hard enough. Adding to the confusion is the way photos were credited – or more appropriately, not credited – during the heyday of his career.
Photographers with the USIA, Army Signal Corps, and other government agencies routinely received no credit on their work. The USIA, specifically, was forbidden by law to disseminate its work domestically (which could explain why many of the photographers working in Washington at the same time as O’Donnell say they had never heard of him.)
At the same time, the practice at the AP and at UPI was to send photos over the wires without credits, or only with initials indicating who took the picture. (Now, the International Press Telecommunications Council captioning process, or IPTC, ensures that photographers’ names stay with their images, along with other data.)
“Many pictures were anonymous, and on bigger stories that was more common because there were a number of photographers shooting and the pictures were edited en masse,” recalls the AP’s Buell. “Sometimes there were arguments over who shot what.”
Buell and Haynes of UPI both remember photographers resorting to filing grooves in the frames on their shutters, so that every image they made showed a notch at the bottom of the negative. The shooters knew whose camera had one notch or two or three, and that’s how negs were identified.
It wasn’t until sometime in the early 1970s that the wire services began routinely putting photographer’s names with photos, at the request of newspapers like The New York Times, Haynes recalls.
“Essentially we worked for speed, trying to beat AP,” he says. “We had to not only cover something, but we also had to process, print, and ship film to New York. They didn’t have a priority to keep the photographer’s name with the photographer’s stuff. Even the day after it was tough to determine who shot what. It went on that way until the papers started asking the wire services, ‘Hey this is a good picture, who shot it?’”
Even though Stearns’ name went out with his famous photo, only about half the papers that ran it credited him. While credits appear with his and Harry Leder’s images of John-John saluting, several similar salute photos at Corbis have no credits. If more than 70 photographers were aiming their lenses at the Kennedys that day, are there yet more versions of the salute? Have they been lost to time and anonymity? Could O’Donnell’s “real” John-John photo be among them? Family members say O’Donnell always spoke of having attended the funeral, even prior to the onset of dementia.
Besides the John-John photo, other photos in the archives showing presidents and dignitaries – subjects that would have drawn hoards of press photographers – are eerily similar and yet carry no credits or show that they were shot by several people.
Buell says he thinks that this confusion, coupled with O’Donnell’s dementia, could explain how the photographer convinced himself others’ images were his own.
“Part of it is the ‘fog of war,’” he says. “Even when the names are there the stories get blurred. Things get twisted and turned. Sometimes it’s intent and sometimes things just happen that way.”
The O’Donnell saga has not yet reached a conclusion. Lawyers for Corbis were reviewing the use of Stearns’ image by O’Donnell and The Arts Company, which took down its online O’Donnell page as soon as Brown learned of the problems.
Kimiko Sakai and Tyge O’Donnell have both apologized for the erroneous photo credits, and were working to remove false online content. Stearns, still fuming, told his local newspaper The Capital that he didn’t believe the dementia argument.
Those who were close to O’Donnell say they are struggling to cope with their grief while attempting to restore his shattered reputation.
“I understand why Mr. Stearns would be angry, and without knowing Joe, it looks really bad,” says David Tower, a documentary producer based in Buffalo, NY, who for the past six years has been working on a film of O’Donnell’s life. “But knowing him, there was no intent to make money or gain fame. He lived very frugally in a small apartment. (The Downhold group) wants to make it seem like everything is in question because of this.”
Tyge O’Donnell says he, too, understands the anger and dismay in the photojournalism community, though he is stunned by the venom in certain online responses. One writer called his father a “crooked scumbag,” while others nicknamed him the Forrest Gump of photojournalism – joking that like the slow-witted character in the movie, he seemed to be in every important place at the right time.
A widely-circulated report from the DigitalJournalist.org flatly states O’Donnell “took it upon himself to represent well-known pictures made by known photographers for his own benefit and glory. … This was not a mistake of memory; it was intentional.”
(DigitalJournalist.org claimed to have found five “no more than mediocre” images by O’Donnell in the Truman library; further research shows the photos were not taken by Joe O’Donnell, but rather had similar names associated with them. In four of the images, Truman is grouse hunting at a farm owned by a Frank O’Donnell. The fifth shows Margaret Truman standing next to Gertrude O’Donnell, the Democratic Vice Chairwoman.)
Tyge O’Donnell says he worries most about the effect all this confusion will have on his father’s true legacy: the photos from post-atomic Japan. No evidence has surfaced to put the images in O’Donnell’s book in doubt.
Toward the end of his life, Joe O’Donnell traveled to schools, churches, and museums in the United States, Japan, and Europe, displaying his Hiroshima and Nagasaki pictures and talking about his experiences. Tyge O’Donnell hopes to continue his father’s efforts to make people aware of the horrors of nuclear war.
“It’s been a tough time,” he says. “I want people to know he was a good man who took some extraordinary photographs. He never did this intentionally, and I hope when Stearns loses his marbles people will be nicer to him.
“At his funeral, my sister said, ‘Dad wouldn’t have cared if he was remembered fondly or not, just that he was remembered.’ That’s been accomplished. I just want some dignity for him.”
Researcher Laurie Graulich contributed to this report.
