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.”
It All Falls Apart.
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:
- A photo of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, riding in an open car listed on O’Donnell’s personal Web site (now defunct) as one he took at FDR’s second inauguration: A nearly identical photo (FDR’s hand is down instead of touching his hat) is copyrighted by Corbis with captioning information that says it was taken on April 13, 1941, as the Roosevelts left Easter services at St. Thomas Episcopal Church. On that date, O’Donnell would have been 19 years old and, by his own accounts, a new Marine in training.
- A photo of FDR, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference listed on O’Donnell’s personal Web site: According to the Roosevelt presidential library, the photo was taken on Nov. 29, 1943, and is a public domain image taken by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. O’Donnell would have been 21 and still a Marine.
- A portrait of President Harry Truman, on O’Donnell’s site: This photo is attributed to Frank Gatteri by the Truman presidential library.
- A portrait of President John F. Kennedy, the first portrait shown of JFK on O’Donnell’s site: An official White House photo distributed from 1961 to 1963 and is listed as public domain at the JFK presidential library.
- A portrait of John F. Kennedy in a rocking chair on O’Donnell’s site: The Kennedy library attributes this 1959 photo to John Vachan of Look magazine.
- References to O’Donnell as an “official White House photographer”: Family members say that the “official” moniker was attached to O’Donnell by the media in stories about him starting in the 1990s, when an earlier version of his book came out in Japan. O’Donnell did use the term “White House photographer” to indicate he worked there (the term appears in his book) but not to imply that he was on the White House staff, they say.
- A written claim, on the dust jacket of his book, that he photographed Jackie Kennedy in her bloodstained suit on Air Force One the day of the assassination: The only known photo of the first lady in that suit aboard the plane was taken by Cecil Stoughton, showing Jackie standing next to Lyndon Johnson as he takes the oath of office. O’Donnell is not known to have been in Dallas at the time of JFK’s death.
- A verbal claim in a 1997 interview with the Assassination Archives and Research Center that he viewed the original Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination with Jackie Kennedy, and that at her request he edited out a portion of the film showing the wound to the president’s head: The Zapruder film has always graphically shown the injuries to the president’s head as they occur. Moreover, it would have been impossible for O’Donnell to obtain the original film, which according to many sources remained in Dallas in the possession of Zapruder until it was purchased by Life magazine the next day. About his interview with O’Donnell, the AARC’s Jeremy Gunn wrote in ‘97: “O’Donnell’s memory was uneven. He sometimes had trouble remembering the presidents’ names.”
- A written claim, in numerous publications, that he walked with Truman on the beach at Wake Island, asked the president if he’d had any doubts about the atomic bombings, and received this response: “Hell yes! I’ve had a lot misgivings about it, and I inherited a lot more, too!”: O’Donnell, did, in fact, travel to Wake Island with Truman, according to presidential travel logs. And Truman was known for his frequent walks, often with photographers in tow, according to Hal Buell, formerly of the AP. But no one else witnessed what O’Donnell claims Truman said, and Truman never shared such forceful doubts publicly, according to presidential library records and other sources.
Credit Where Credit Is Due.
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.”
Grief & A Man's Reputation.
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.
NPPA Marketplace
- Join the NPPA
- NPPA members receive a wide range of benefits, from educational opportunities to mentoring, exclusive discounts, insurance options, business tips, and much more.