January 20th is Inauguration Day and it is also Diana Walker’s birthday. Walker grew up in Washington, and every four years, when she was a child, her parents took her to the Inaugural Parade as a birthday present. She loved those occasions. Her sense of how Washington politics, journalism, and public service intertwine began to develop in those days and she seems to have been born with the social grace that eventually allowed her to gain access to the presidency.

Walker has photographed five Presidents, from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton. Her coverage also includes First Ladies, diverse political players in each administration, and her colleagues in the press. Her unique achievement has involved going beyond the official events that mark a Presidency—state dinners, summits, funerals, election campaigns—to photograph private moments that humanize each officeholder —Reagan carrying a basket of cookies to his wife recovering from surgery; George Bush inspecting hurricane damage to his house in Maine; Bill Clinton backstage, taking a deep breath before facing a huge crowd at the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton scrutinizing her daughter’s outfit before the inaugural parade in 1997.

Walker began photographing the White House as a freelancer for the Washington Monthly and the Village Voice in the mid-1970’s, during the Ford administration, and her last day was Clinton’s last day in office. She began working for Time magazine in the late seventies, and in 1992—at the start of George Bush’s campaign for re-election—Walker and Time together requested, and were granted, the opportunity to get behind-the-scenes occasionally, to shoot exclusive pictures of presidential life away from official, public events. The arrangement clearly suited all concerned because the special access continued all the way through the Clinton administration. The resulting pictures have won awards from World Press, the White House News Photographers Association and the National Press Photographers Association, and they are in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums. Walker’s photographs were shown at the International Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan, France, this year. And in 2003 the National Museum of American History will mount a full retrospective of her photography.

Diana Walker’s new book, PUBLIC & PRIVATE: TWENTY YEARS PHOTOGRAPHING THE PRESIDENCY, showcases her Presidential work. The photographs are remarkably good, which is reason enough to publish this book, but there is more: Alongside the photographs, the Presidents and First Ladies appearing in them offer their thoughts, opinions, and memories of the moments the pictures were taken. And Walker tells her stories as well.

As the editor of PUBLIC & PRIVATE, I had the wonderful good fortune over this past year of collaborating closely with Diana Walker, and in the process I came to see that the photographs are like Walker herself—intelligent, intensely alive, sensitive, and optimistic. You can’t help wanting to spend time with Walker’s pictures. They allow you to see the Presidents and those around them as human beings, and they have given us memories we would’t have otherwise.

This month, viewers of Digital Journalist are in for a particular treat: Dirck Halstead, Diana Walker’s friend and former Time colleague in the White House, presents a selection of Walker’s photographs along with her thoughts behind them, the effort and enterprise that made them possible, and the process that brought them to life.

© LEAH BENDAVID-VAL
Contributor
LeahBV@aol.com