Bob Daugherty, AP photographer with a knack for capturing history

“It was a handshake to remember,” Daugherty said. “Decades of history running through those two hands.” That evening the Associated Press photographer was a few feet away from the two leaders as they rose at a state banquet and raised a glass to each other and a new understanding between their countries.

Daugherty was on the spot for this highlight of Nixon’s presidency and he was there again two years later for the humiliating end. He was in front of the helicopter on the White House lawn as Nixon, his name and legacy tarnished by scandal, left office. At the top of the steps, the president turned, flung out his hands in a double V for victory. Another image for the history books.

“Bob was always in the right place,” the late Hal Buell, the AP executive news photo editor, said. “He had a political insight that warned him what would happen.” Or, as Daugherty put it: “In news photography the moment is a fragile thing. It’s fleeting, even unseen by the naked eye. Our job is to make sure we don’t miss that moment.”

Sometimes he had to wait a long time. He was outside the British consulate in Reykjavik in October 1986 to capture the end of a snap summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The press waited in hail and high winds for six hours, while negotiators scuttled in and out. Rumour spread that the cold war was over. Not quite. Discussions on eliminating nuclear weapons foundered, as Reagan put it, “because of a single word”. In fading light, the US and Soviet leaders emerged. “I could see through my lens their expressions and that it had fallen apart at the seams,” Daugherty said. His image of a stony-faced Reagan and an anxious-looking Gorbachev told you exactly the summit’s mood.

In 40 years in AP’s Washington office, Daugherty photographed nine presidents, 22 party conventions and plenty of scandals and stardust. He also indulged a love of sports, covering Super Bowls and World Series, Olympics and Masters golf tournaments. One of his favourite photos was a ground-level shot of Secretariat as he churned up the turf on his way to a 1973 Kentucky Derby record that still stands.

Daugherty was born in a three-room wooden house in Kentucky in 1939, the son of a sharecropper. Aged 11, he delivered a weekly newspaper called Grit to farmers. “I can’t read,” one told him, “but I sure like the pictures.” This made him think. “Maybe pictures were the universal communication,” he said. “I spent 50 years communicating with my camera.”

After his father moved the family north to Marion, Indiana, Daugherty began to take photographs with a box camera. At 16, he was offered a job by the Marion Chronicle. “I earned my junior college degree at the Chronicle, bachelor’s degree at the [Indianapolis] Star and master’s with the Associated Press,” he said. He married Stephanie Hoppes, a writer on the Star, in 1963, the year he joined AP.

He was quick to show a knack of being in the right place at the right time. On Halloween night 1963, a gas tank exploded at an Indianapolis fair, killing 64 and injuring 385. Daugherty, who lived nearby, got there before the fire brigade, shot 24 frames and dashed back to the bureau. When New York head office called for a stock image of the Fairgrounds Coliseum for their coverage, he said he could do better than that and within five minutes had sent them his roll of live images.

In 1960, Daugherty had dangled from a hotel roof to capture Harry Truman, the former president, on a visit to Marion. Presidents would soon be his stock in trade. In 1968 he pestered a White House aide to allow him to photograph Lyndon Johnson, open-collared and looking exhausted from the stress of the Vietnam war, as he wrote the speech declining his party’s nomination to run again.

Daugherty shot another momentous handshake after Jimmy Carter signed a peace treaty with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1979. Four months later, he was there when Carter visited Bardstown, Kentucky. While the rest of the press moved on to the auditorium where the president would speak, Daugherty stayed with the motorcade. It meant he was the only photographer present when the normally staid president stopped his limousine and, to the horror of his security detail, climbed up on the roof to wave at cheering well-wishers.

Daugherty later said that for all the moments of high political drama, this relaxed shot was one of his favourites. It again showed his instincts for breaking news were correct. “You must stay alert when you’re with the president,” he said. “You must be prepared.”

Bob Daugherty, photographer, was born on 16 January 1939, and died on 21 July 2025, aged 86

Photograph by AP