Presidential images: photographs by George Tames, 1944-74.

• Author: Panzer, Mary

This pioneering photojournalist "found a way to make images that conveyed information without betraying trust and was rewarded with the friendship of national leaders."

George Tames learned to be a photographer the same way he learned about history, politics, psychology, and diplomacy: through innate curiosity, unbounded energy, and direct access to the best sources anyone could imagine. His classrooms were the halls, offices, conference rooms, and hidden passages of the U.S. Capitol, and his teachers were the politicians who made the laws and the reporters who wrote about them.

Tames' father was a Greek-Albanian immigrant. His family settled in the ethnic Southwest section of Washington, D.C., alongside Irish, Syrian, Italian, and Jewish neighbors. As a boy, he caught his first fish in the Tidal Basin, rode his sled down the snow-covered hill below the Washington Monument, and on summer days sold cold drinks from a pushcart on Independence Ave. In the late 1930s, Tames dropped out of high school to help support his family. In 1938, when Tames was 18, a friend helped him get a job as a copyboy for the Washington bureau of Time magazine, where he carried equipment for the photographers and wrote captions. Soon, he began taking his own pictures, and in 1945 was hired as a photographer for The New York Times, where he remained for more than 40 years.

Tames became a photographer when print journalists maintained an aristocratic hold over the press corps. As Tames recalled, "We were a craft in a literary profession." Photographs occupied only a small place on the pages of the daily press, and deservedly so, with images of Washington largely confined to "local horse races and handshakes." However, he quickly recognized that his ability to "operate this little gizmo" gave him access to people and places that most reporters never saw. With his winning smile, his competitive spirit, and his unending confidence in the democratic process, Tames used his camera to forge a new kind of journalism.

Tames followed a regular routine: arriving in the Senate dining room for morning coffee, he traded jokes and gossip, asked about the day's events, and then planned his approach. "I always want to go around the back. I always want to go in advance. I always want to make my pictures when the witnesses show up, just as he sits down, just as he talks." As a result, Tames made photographs that conveyed something more than the simple identity of the participants. His...