| Birth: | May 11, 1935
Harwood
Anne Arundel County
Maryland, USA | | Death: | Mar. 2, 2012
Annapolis
Anne Arundel County
Maryland, USA | 
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Annapolis native Stan Stearns was 76
By E.B. FURGURSON III, Staff Writer
Published 03/03/12
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Annapolis native and photographer Stan Stearns, who took the iconic photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's caisson-borne casket Nov. 25, 1963, died early Friday morning from lung cancer. He was 76 years old.
Stan Stearns was born in Annapolis on May 11, 1935, son of William and Lillian Stearns.
He attended local schools and graduated from Annapolis High School in 1954.
Though he had no formal photographic training he acquired talent early. At age 14 he won a prize from the Annapolis Camera Club for a photo he took at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington.
When he was 16 Stearns kicked off his career with a job at this newspaper, then The Evening Capital.
After a stint as a school photographer for a Texas firm and four years in the U.S. Air Force as a photographer for Stars and Stripes, he came home and kept knocking on the door at the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun trying to land a job.
With some help from Annapolis photographer Marion Warren he finally landed at United Press International going to work in Washington at the end of the Eisenhower administration.
Stearns, who started his photography career at this newspaper, was working for United Press International on the day of President John F. Kennedy's funeral, three days after the young president was assassinated in Dallas.
He was assigned to follow the president's widow and an entourage of world leaders as they made their way from the White House to St. Matthew's Cathedral for the funeral service.
Herded behind a cordon with scores of other photographers across the street from the church he concentrated on Mrs. Kennedy.
He saw her lean over and say something to her son. A second later John-John stepped forward and saluted his father. It was his third birthday.
Stearns raised his camera and snapped the photo felt around the world.
Stearns learned from the press gaggle he was the only one to get the photo of the salute and rushed back to UPI's office convinced he had the shot of the day. He was right.
The photo remains one of the most searing images of post-war America and to this day can evoke emotions of that dark weekend in those who experienced it nearly 50 years ago.
Filmed television coverage also caught the moment but for many worldwide it was Stearns' still image that captured the moment for history.
By the mid-1970s Stearns left the breakneck pace of Washington and opened a studio photography business in Annapolis. The shop opened first on Maryland Avenue, then moved to West Street and finally Main Street, before he moved it into his Eastport home.
Area photographer David Anderson founded the Professional Photographers Organization of Greater Annapolis in 1998 and quickly got to know Stearns.
"He came to our very first meeting and we became friends immediately," Anderson said.
He said his friend was very particular about his work. "He prided himself saying he did not take pictures, he created images."
Anderson noted Stearns liked to use ambient light as often as possible and tried to eschew digital photography for as long as he could but eventually succumbed to the new technology.
"He also talked about what he called machine gunner photographers who would take 100 frames just to get one good one. Stan tried to make every shot count."
By the mid-1970s Stearns left the breakneck pace of Washington and opened a studio photography business in Annapolis. The shop opened first on Maryland Avenue, then moved to West Street and finally Main Street, before he moved it into his Eastport home.
Area photographer David Anderson founded the Professional Photographers Organization of Greater Annapolis in 1998 and quickly got to know Stearns.
"He came to our very first meeting and we became friends immediately," Anderson said.
He said his friend was very particular about his work. "He prided himself saying he did not take pictures, he created images."
Anderson noted Stearns liked to use ambient light as often as possible and tried to eschew digital photography for as long as he could but eventually succumbed to the new technology.
"He also talked about what he called machine gunner photographers who would take 100 frames just to get one good one. Stan tried to make every shot count."
In 2007 a controversy erupted after an obituary for another photographer, Joe O'Donnell, mentioned he, not Stearns, had taken the famous shot. Apparently O'Donnell had made the claim. Photographers scrambled to Stearns' side to prove he had taken the photo.
Stearns' son, Jay A. Stearns, lives in Crownsville and is also a photographer. He operates Landmarks Photography.
He took to photography at his father's knee and recalled his father's quick transition from press photography to the studio business. "He wanted to start at the top and he did. He shot Marvin Mandel and Gladys Knight and the Pips, and everyone in between. He had a gift and made it into a profession."
Stearns' house was full of the great photographs of world leaders and others. Presidents Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and of course the most famous one of JFK Jr.
Stearns passed away at the Hospice of the Chesapeake's Mandrin House in Harwood where he had been for the last few weeks, a relative said.
Stan Stearns, 76, who took the photo of little John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin, died March 2.
"One exposure on a roll of 36 exposures," Stan Stearns marveled decades later. The young news photographer, in one instinctive click, captured one of the most poignant and reproduced images of the past half-century: little John F. Kennedy Jr., grief-stricken, saluting his father's coffin as it rolled by on a caisson.
Mr. Stearns died of cancer March 2 at the Mandrin care facility in Harwood, said his niece, Karla Bowles. He was 76 and had spent the past four decades running a photography studio in his native Annapolis.
His most enduring contribution to photography indisputably came on the chilly morning of Nov. 25, 1963, when he covered the funeral procession of the President John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Stearns was working in Washington for the United Press International wire service when Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Outside Washington's Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, where the president was celebrated and mourned a few days later, Mr. Stearns was jammed with 70 other photojournalists into a roped-off space meant for perhaps half as many.
As Kennedy's caisson rolled by, Mr. Stearns trained his telephoto lens on first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who was veiled in black. When she bent down to whisper in her son's ear, Mr. Stearns clicked as 3-year-old John Jr.'s right hand snapped into a salute. The boy was dressed in a blue dress coat and short pants. It was also his birthday.
"As the caisson was rolling out to Arlington Cemetery," Mr. Stearns later recalled, "I asked every photographer I could if they had the salute. Duh! Nobody saw it. Everyone I talked to had been concentrating on Jackie and the caisson."
He returned to the office, satisfied that he had the best picture of the day.
"The bureau chief almost had a hemorrhage," Mr. Stearns told the Annapolis Capital in 2009. "I never saw a man turn as white as he did because I was not with the entourage going to Arlington. Then the big boss from New York overheard that and he said, ‘You better have it or you're fired on the spot.' "
He had it.
The picture made the front pages of newspapers worldwide and was printed in mass-circulation magazines such as Life. The image came to define the emotion of the event in a way words may not have had the power to convey.
Just the mention of the salute can still revive memories for those who lived through that day. It remains one of perhaps a handful of pictures that evoke the span of the mid-20th century: Joe Rosenthal's image of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, Eddie Adams's photo of a South Vietnamese general's street-side execution of a suspected Viet Cong, Nick Ut's picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.
Mr. Stearns's picture still resonates so completely because it speaks to the "trope of the brave little soldier that existed in American visual culture," said Alison Nordstrom, a senior photography curator at the George Eastman House, a photography museum in Rochester, N.Y.
Nordstrom said the Kennedys so fascinated the public because they were a young, photogenic family and so vibrant in the wake of the Eisenhower years. Familiar images of the Kennedy children — John Jr. hiding under his father's desk, the president's daughter Caroline with a pony — crystallized the way the public knew and identified with the family.
Mr. Stearns's image of the salute brought it all together, Nordstrom said, "a combination of familiar tropes and familiar sentiments with figures who felt known to us."
In 1999, John Kennedy Jr. was presumed dead after a small airplane he was piloting went missing. He was 38. Mr. Stearns's picture was again summoned to remind readers and viewers of what the former first son had once represented.
"I felt a strong connection to him," Mr. Stearns told the Baltimore Sun in 1999. "Covering the White House during the Kennedy years, I had a son just two years younger than John-John."
Stanley Frank Stearns was born May 11, 1935, in Annapolis, where his parents owned a jewelry shop. His interest was jazz drumming until a relative gave him a Brownie Flash Six-20 camera for his bar mitzvah. He attended Annapolis High School and, at 16, began working as a photographer for the Capital newspaper.
He was an Air Force photographer from 1954 to 1958, taking pictures for military publications in Japan, and then joined UPI in a position he later described as "one step above floor sweeper."
Mr. Stearns left the wire service in the early 1970s to start a photography studio in Annapolis. He continued working until his death. His niece described him as "cantankerous and very meticulous."
His marriage to Maxine Skwersky ended in divorce. Survivors include a son, commercial photographer Jay Stearns of Annapolis; a brother; and four grandchildren.
For Mr. Stearns, the compensation for his most noted photograph was entirely in glory.
"I got $25 for winning picture of the month" at UPI, he told the Sun. "That and my regular paycheck. It's frustrating when I think of how much money that picture has made in the last 30 years. Probably $3 million to $5 million."
Services for Stearns will be held at Hardesty Funeral Home on Ridgely Avenue in Annapolis on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. He will be buried in the Maryland Veteran's Cemetery in Crownsville.
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Joshua McKerrow — The Capital / file Annapolis photographer Stan Stearns holds his portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin on Nov. 25, 1963. Stearns died Friday from lung cancer. He was 76.
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| | | Burial:
Crownsville Veterans Cemetery
Crownsville
Anne Arundel County
Maryland, USA
Plot: Section: 2D1 Row: 4 Site: 14 |
Created by: Marion Steiding-Chappell
Record added: Mar 03, 2012
Find A Grave Memorial# 86173382 |
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