Jacques Lowe; Recorded Kennedy Era in Thousands of Photographs

Jacques Lowe, who took tens of thousands of photographs of John F. Kennedy and his family during the presidential campaign of 1960 and the White House years, died Saturday in New York City of cancer, a family spokesman said. He was 71.

A self-taught photographer whose work was widely published in magazines such as Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Fortune and Ladies’ Home Journal, Lowe also had a lucrative career as a corporate and advertising photographer. His advertising accounts included AT&T;, United Airlines and American Express.

In his later years he photographed some of the more noted figures in jazz, including Oscar Peterson and Ray Charles, and was a contributor to a jazz magazine. He also published photographic books about London’s financial district, Pope John Paul II’s journey to South America and the history of the gramophone.

But it was as the foremost photographic chronicler of the Kennedy years that Lowe will be best remembered.

Working primarily in black and white and generally only with available light, he made nearly 40,000 images of Kennedy, his wife, Jacqueline, and their children on the campaign trail and in the White House. He showed them in large crowds in big cities and in more private moments in small-town coffee shops killing time between campaign appearances. His pictures of the Kennedys appeared in more than 200 magazines and were the basis of numerous Kennedy-themed photo books.

Lowe was present for the historic moments as well. He was the only photographer in the room when Kennedy offered the vice presidential candidacy to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960. The photographer also chronicled the tense White House atmosphere during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crises early in the Kennedy presidency.

Born in Cologne, Germany, Lowe and his family escaped the Nazis during World War II but stayed in Europe. Lowe moved to the United States in 1949 and took a number of odd jobs to support himself. Two years later he began his photographic career as an assistant to noted photographer Alfred Newman.

“He was a well-known, much respected portrait photographer, very meticulous,” Lowe would later recall of Newman. “He would make me do the same print 200 times until he was satisfied. Because of it, I’m one of the best printers in the business. . . . What some people think is a good print, I think is garbage.”

Lowe entered and won a contest for young photographers sponsored by Life magazine in the mid-1950s. Fueled by that validation, he opened his own photographic studio.

One of his early magazine assignments was to photograph Robert F. Kennedy, then a rising young lawyer working for Senate committees.

Lowe visited the family home and took a number of photographs of Kennedy, including shots of scores of children and pets that populated the scene. The patriarch of the clan, Joseph P. Kennedy, saw the photographs and was so impressed with their quality that he hired Lowe to photograph another son, John, the senator from Massachusetts who was running for reelection.

And although most of the photographs Lowe made were of John F. Kennedy in casual moments, Lowe recalled that the future president hated one aspect of the photographic craft: posing for magazine covers.

“He was very bad at that,” Lowe told a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer some years ago. “I had to convince him that there were a hundred million votes in the photo, and that helped for a while. But he’d fumble again, and I’d up the figure, and he’d be OK for maybe five seconds. Jackie was good at posing.”

Lowe stayed on, photographing the Kennedys after they moved into the White House, but grew tired of the task after just one year, noting: “The White House gets very boring unless you’re deeply involved in policy or you’re a politician.”

Lowe was in New York when word came of Kennedy’s assassination. He finally believed it when a newspaper editor called his studio looking for a copy of his photograph of Kennedy offering the vice presidency to Johnson.

Five years later Lowe gave up his photographic business and left the United States after Robert Kennedy was felled by an assassin’s bullet. He lived in Paris, Geneva and London for the next 16 years before returning to New York in 1984 to open a graphic design firm, the Visual Arts Project.

Over the last decade, Lowe organized traveling exhibitions of his Kennedy photographs, including one focusing on Jacqueline that raised $3 million for the former first lady’s lymphoma fund.

For his part, Lowe seemed surprised by the power that the Kennedy images held over the years.

He cited with wonder one instance in Moscow: “It was amazing, because it became sort of a sensational magnet for people. They were standing in lines around the corner, and all these people in babushkas spent hours looking at these pictures with tears running down their faces. Then they’d come back and put flowers next to the photographs.”

Married and divorced four times, Lowe is survived by two sons and three daughters.