Famed Photojournalist Stanley Tretick's Iconic Photographs Go Online

More than 8,000 images of major American figures -- Presidents, movie stars, athletes, artists -- go online at http://www.stanleytretick.com/.

Stanley Tretick, an award-winning photojournalist, died in 1999, and left his photo archive to the writer Kitty Kelley. As legal representative for the estate, Kelley has worked with Victoria Rehberg of ArtVision Exhibitions to set up the Web site for historians, librarians, photo researchers, publishers, and collectors.

Tretick worked for LIFE, Look, NBC, People, and UPI and he covered every President from Harry S. Truman through Ronald Reagan. On Capitol Hill, he photographed the Senate Rackets Committee hearings in 1957 and so angered the gangster Johnny Dio that the mobster took a swing at him. A photo showing Tretick ducking accompanied an article he wrote for the New York Herald Tribune (March 15, 1958) entitled "I Shoot the Big Shots."

In 1973, Tretick covered the Senate Watergate hearings, Tretick's work also encompassed special stills for various films, including "All The President's Men," "Reds," "The Candidate," "The Natural," "Urban Cowboy," "The Electric Horseman," "Year of the Dragon," "The Witness" and "Barbarosa."

During the Kennedy White House years, Tretick was given special access to the family, and he shot some of his most enduring images. One of his most famous is the picture of three-year-old John Kennedy, Jr. playing under his father's desk in the Oval Office. The photo was taken a month before President Kennedy was assassinated.

During World War II, Tretick was trained as a photographer in the Marine Corps and he served in the South Pacific. After a stint as a copyboy for The Washington Post, he joined Acme Newspictures and photographed the fighting in the Korean War. His image of a soldier in South Korea with his head buried in his hands, his helmet on the ground, was selected by the Military Times Publishing Company as one of The 100 Greatest Military Photographs.

He also published three books of photographs: "A Very Special President" with Laura Berquist; "A Portrait of All The President's Men" with Jack Hirshberg and "They Could Not Trust the King" with William V. Shannon.