Top
For more than thirty years, photographer and filmmaker George Butler has documented the public and private life of his friend John Kerry.
Asked to handle press for Kerry's first political campaign - a run for Congress in 1969 - Butler began taking pictures to promote the young candidate. The two men have stayed in touch ever since, and Butler has continued to photograph the man he always believed could one day be President.
When Kerry, a decorated war hero, mesmerized the nation with his speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, Butler was there to record it. Butler and his Leica camera also captured Kerry's leadership role as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and as an active participant in the peace movement; his key political campaigns of the seventies, eighties, and nineties; quiet moments with his family on vacation on Cape Cod and the nearby islands; his marriages to Julia Thorne and Teresa Heinz Kerry; his relationship with his daughters, Alex and Vanessa; and scenes from his presidential campaign.
Butler's feature-length film about Kerry, loosely based on Douglas Brinkley's bestselling book Tour of Duty, focuses largely on how the Vietnam War affected Kerry and incorporates many of the still photographs that appear in this collection.
