NEW YORK — Kathy Willens, a trailblazing photojournalist who helped advance the position of women behind the lens from the Super Bowl to war-torn Somalia during her nearly 45-year career at The Associated Press, died Tuesday. She was 74.
Willens died at her Brooklyn home from ovarian cancer, which was diagnosed shortly after her birth. Pension 2021said her cousin Ben Willens.
Willens was a giving colleague but a fierce competitor who would not tolerate interference between her and a photograph. She was one of the AP’s first female staff photographers. She shot more than 90,000 photographs — of presidents and Pope John Paul II, protests and war, sports victories and human tragedies.
“A walk through her archive is a walk through history,” says former AP Director of Photography J. David Ake, who has edited many of Willens’ photographs over the past two decades of her career. It could be a challenging task, given her penchant for shooting lots of frames.
“But there was always a gem in those images. Something she saw that no one around her saw,” Ake said by email.
Willens, who specialized in sports, became such a photographer that the New York Yankees honored her on the field when she retired. During a pregame ceremony, team manager Aaron Boone presented her with a framed print, signed by former pitcher David Cone, of her own photo of him after he threw a perfect game in 1999.
It had been a long road since her introduction to photojournalism in the mid-1970s, when few women worked in the industry.
“When I was doing sports reporting, I was almost always the only woman on the field,” Willens told Buzzfeed News in 2021. “There were no role models for me.”
Willens developed her interest in cameras from her father, Lionel, a jewelry store owner and amateur photographer who kept a darkroom in their Detroit-area home, her cousin said. Her mother, Gertrude, was a dental hygienist, and the parents’ various occupations sometimes intersected in unexpected ways, such as when the family gathered to look at slides from a vacation.
“We looked at photos from travels and every now and then you would see some selections,” said Ben Willens.
Kathy Willens began her professional career as a freelancer for newspapers in the Detroit suburbs in 1974. She soon landed a job at the now-defunct The Miami News as a photo lab technician, then as a staff photographer, where she collected front-page and other notable photos. The AP hired her in 1976.
Working out of Miami, Willens covered the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when nearly 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. in six months. He also covered the aftermath of the deadly riots that same year after four police officers were acquitted of fatally beating a black insurance executive, Arthur McDuffie.
She photographed Ronald Reagan during his presidential campaign in 1980, George HW Bush surfing shortly after he won office eight years later, and the late British President queen elizabeth II visited the Bahamas in 1977. And in one of the photos that would build Willens’ sports portfolio, she captured then-world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in a Miami Beach boxing gym.
“For me, sports has the ability to capture these moments of extreme emotion,” Willens told Buzzfeed. “The joy of it, it’s always there in front of you.”
During her career, she would cover six Olympic Games, 11 Super Bowls, and countless NBA Finals, World Series and other championships. One of her proudest moments was seeing a 1977 photo she took of tennis pioneer Billie Jean King on the cover of King’s 2021 autobiography, “All In.”
Willens was also drawn to the stories of Haitian and Cuban immigrants in Florida, which were exhibited at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in 2004.
After being transferred to AP’s New York headquarters in 1993, she was sent to Somalia in the midst of its civil war. Several of Willens’ fellow photojournalists were captured and killed while covering the country at the time, and Willens told Buzzfeed that upon returning to New York, she decided she wanted to cover more news and sports closer to home.
Her peers and competitors in New York came to know her as a photographer who couldn’t stay out of the picture. She got into position and got her shot, no matter how much guts, ingenuity, scrum savvy, and know-how it took.
“She just wouldn’t let a picture be turned down. And her photography was just simple and precise, but at the same time really exquisite,” said AP business photo editor Peter Morgan, who worked with Willens for years when he oversaw photo coverage of the New York metropolitan area.
“She was just really good at finding the right moment,” he said. “Sometimes you had to look at her pictures a little bit more to really get them. But once you saw them, you saw how brilliant they were.”
She would do many of these, plus projects like an eight-month documentary photo series about mothers in prisons in upstate New York. Even during the last six months of her career, Willens pushed hard to pull off a difficult project, about a high school for struggling students, that ultimately proved impossible.
Willens has won a number of journalism awards, including an Associated Press Managing Editors Award for Reportorial Excellence and multiple awards in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame photo contests.
While working at AP, Willens taught photojournalism for years as an adjunct professor at New York University. Just a few months ago, she met up with an acquaintance to share her expertise, her cousin said.
She was also an avid bird watcher and often took photographs of her finds in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
Her nephew is organizing a memorial service there.