NEW YORK — Kathy Willens, a pathbreaking photojournalist who helped cement women’s place behind the lens everywhere from the Super Bowl to war-torn Somalia during her nearly 45-year career at the Associated Press, died Tuesday. She was 74.
Ms. Willens died at her Brooklyn home of ovarian cancer, diagnosed shortly after her 2021 retirement, her nephew Ben Willens said.
A giving colleague but fierce competitor who brooked no interference between her and a picture, Ms. Willens was among the AP’s first female staff photographers. She went on to shoot more than 90,000 images — of presidents and Pope John Paul II, protests and war, sports triumphs and human tragedy.
“A stroll through her archive is a stroll through history,” said former AP director of photography J. David Ake, who edited many of Ms. Willens’s pictures over the last two decades of her career. It could be a challenging task, given her penchant for shooting a lot of frames.
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“But in those images, there was always a gem. Something she saw, that no one around her did,” Ake said by email.
Specializing in sports, Ms. Willens . was honored by the New York Yankees with a pre-game ceremony when she retired. Manager Aaron Boone gave her a framed print, signed by former pitcher David Cone, of her photo of Cone after he threw a perfect game in 1999.
It had been a long path from her introduction to photojournalism in the mid-1970s, when few women were in that part of the business.
“When covering sports, I was almost always the only female on the field,” Ms. Willens told BuzzFeed News in 2021. “There were no role models for me.”
She developed her interest in cameras from her father, Lionel, a jewelry store owner and hobbyist photographer who kept a darkroom in their Detroit-area home, her nephew said. Her mother, Gertrude, was a dental hygienist, and the parents’ various pursuits would sometimes blend in unexpected ways, such as when the family gathered to view slides from a vacation.
“We’d be looking at pictures of trips, and every now and then, you’d see some molars,” Ben Willens said.
Kathy Willens got her professional start as a freelancer for suburban Detroit newspapers in 1974. She soon landed a job at the now-gone The Miami News as a photo lab technician, then as a staff photographer, racking up front-page and other prominent pictures. The AP hired her in 1976.
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Working from Miami, Ms. Willens covered the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when nearly 125,000 Cubans came to the United States in six months, and the aftermath of deadly rioting that occurred the same year after the acquittal of four police officers charged with fatally beating a Black insurance executive.
She photographed Ronald Reagan campaigning to become president in 1980, George H.W. Bush surf-fishing shortly after winning the office eight years later, and Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth II visiting the Bahamas in 1977. And in one of the images that would build Ms. Willens’s sports portfolio, she captured then-world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali at a Miami Beach boxing gym.
“For me, sports has the ability to capture these moments of extreme emotion,” Ms. Willens told BuzzFeed. “The joy of it, it’s right there in front of you all the time.”
Over her career, she would cover six Olympics, 11 Super Bowls, and many NBA finals, World Series, and other championships. Among her points of pride was seeing a 1977 photo she made of tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King grace the cover of King’s 2021 autobiography ”All In.”
After transferring to AP’s New York headquarters in 1993, she was dispatched to Somalia in the throes of its civil war. Some of her fellow photojournalists were captured and killed covering the country around that time, and she told BuzzFeed that after returning to New York, she decided she wanted to shoot more news and sports closer to home.
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Her New York coworkers and competitors got to know Ms. Willens for her grit, ingenuity, scrum-savvy, and know-how.
“She just would not be denied a picture. And her photography was just simple and precise, but really exquisite, at the same time,” said AP business photo editor Peter Morgan, who worked with Ms. Willens for years while overseeing photo coverage of the New York metro area.
Ms. Willens earned a roster of journalism awards, including multiple wins in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame photo competitions.
Ms. Willens for years taught photojournalism as an adjunct professor at New York University.
She was also a keen birder, often making pictures of her finds in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Her nephew plans a memorial service there.