This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Among the avalanche of films, books, articles and tributes planned for the event, there is a very Detroit-style exhibit at the Lobby Gallery of the Boll Family YMCA.
The exhibit, “He Was The President” shows photographs of Kennedy taken over the years by legendary Detroit Free Press chief photographer Tony Spina. The story of how it ended up at the Boll is an interesting one.
Local photographer Jim Aho attended an estate sale this past April, hoping to pick up some photographs that were being sold. Those were gone by the time Aho arrived, but he found some coffee table books and began leafing through them.
One was a book of photographs that Spina had taken of Kennedy. As a gifted photographer who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Detroit riots, Spina covered Kennedy both during his visits to Detroit and nationally.
Aho got to wondering if the book could be parlayed into some kind of exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination. So he started asking around and eventually, through former Free Press photographer Patricia Beck, was connected with Spina’s widow, Frances and their daughter, Julia.
“(Frances) has pretty much kept his office exactly as he’s left it,” Aho says. The family allowed him to take the original negatives used in the book, along with some that had not been published, to use for the exhibit. He spent the next several months scanning them in, and he and his friend Glenn Corcoran printed them. Jim did all the matting and framing.
In addition to images that were in the book, he included several that have interest mostly locally, such as images of former Michigan governors John Swainson and G. Mennen Williams.
The exhibit came to the Y through Aho’s friend Bruce Giffin, who has exhibited work at the Boll’s Lobby Gallery. It will be hanging through the end of November.
It’s unlikely that we’ll see a photographer the likes of Spina again, Aho says, as the newspaper business changes and papers focus much more on cutting costs and the immediacy of the internet. The exhibit highlights why photojournalists matter, especially one with the talent of Spina.
“You see how much talent he had, to see his vision and how he got himself into that sweet spot to get just the right composition, the right mood, the right moment,” Aho says. “That is a gift.”