Kathy Willens, Photojournalist Seemingly Everywhere, Is Dead at 74

Kathy Willens, Photojournalist Seemingly Everywhere, Is Dead at 74 - The New York Times

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Kathy Willens, Photojournalist Seemingly Everywhere, Is Dead at 74

Guided by a keen sense of timing, she covered wars, sports, riots, politics and more for The A.P. in the ’70s, when few women worked as news photographers.

The best news photographers know it’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. They also must know precisely how to frame a shot and when to click.

Kathy Willens, who was a photographer for The Associated Press for nearly 45 years, covering politics, war, sports and many other subjects, understood both aspects of timing.

She also understood one other: She began her career when there were very few women in photojournalism, in the 1970s, but exactly at the moment when the field was soon to crack open for them, bowing to changing times and pressure from pioneering figures like herself.

Ms. Willens died at her home in Brooklyn on July 16. The cause was ovarian cancer, which was diagnosed just after her retirement in 2021, The A.P. reported. She was 74.

Ms. Willens’s best photographs look like the definitive images of their subjects, even if a viewer has never seen them before: President-elect George H.W. Bush fishing in deep surf; a Miami man looking downcast after rioting over the acquittal of police officers in a 1979 death; a tugboat crammed with Cuban refugees in the 1980 Mariel boatlift; Billie Jean King winding up for a devastating backhand, which became the cover shot of her autobiography, “All In.”

Ms. Willens photographed war-ravaged Somalia, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Muhammad Ali training at a Miami Beach boxing gym and, especially, big sporting events. The A.P. said she covered six Olympics, 11 Super Bowls and innumerable World Series and N.B.A. finals.

Upon her retirement, the New York Yankees paid tribute to her work in a pregame ceremony on the field.

“For me, sports has the ability to capture these moments of extreme emotion,” she told Buzzfeed News after retiring. “The joy of it, it’s right there in front of you all the time.”

Ms. Willens was almost always the only woman on the field when she shot professional sports.

Kathy Ann Willens was born on Dec. 8, 1949, in Detroit, one of two children of G. Lionel Willens, who owned a jewelry store, and Gertrude Willens, a dental hygienist. The family lived in the suburb of Farmington Hills, Mich.

Ms. Willens was hired in 1974 by The Miami News, which has since folded, as a darkroom technician, then became a staff photographer. She knew of just two other women who were working as photographers for Florida newspapers. On slow days, she was told to photograph women on the beach.

“I found a woman wearing the skimpiest bikini that I could find,” she told Buzzfeed, “and I took her photo, printed it out and blew it up and put it on our office wall, and told everyone that this was the last woman I would take a picture of in a bikini.”

In 1976, The A.P. hired her for its Miami bureau, where she worked before relocating to New York in 1993. She became known for consistently returning from an assignment with a defining image.

“Sometimes you had to look at her pictures for an extra second to really get them,” Peter Morgan, a photo editor for The A.P., told the news agency for its obituary of Ms. Willens. “But once you saw them, you got how brilliant they were.”

Here is more of her work: