General
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.”
