Amateur Photographer Magazine

 Kennedy anniversary update: 'Settlement' over loss of JFK photo archive in 9/11 -

Monday 12th November 2007

Chris Cheesman

WORLD TRADE CENTER KENNEDY PHOTO INTRIGUE ROLLS ON
(first published in Amateur Photographer 22 June 2002)

Chris Cheesman traces the story of 40,000 lost Kennedy negs, a missing lock on a safe and a woman's fight to make sense of the demise of her father's historic JFK collection



When photographer Jacques Lowe stashed his 40,000 Kennedy negatives into the vaults of a New York bank, he could never have foreseen the tragedy that would strike his treasured collection 11 years later. For the location of the deposit box - just down the road from the photographer's office - was number 5 World Trade Center, a building adjacent to the twin towers which were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of 11 September.

The pictures represented Lowe's entire Kennedy archive. Most had never been published, many capturing historic moments of the president John F Kennedy at work and play, before JFK was killed by an assassin's bullets in Dallas, Texas in 1963.

Lowe – who was JFK's personal photographer - would never live to witness the 11 September atrocities and with it the demise of his uninsured gems, stored at the bank, JP Morgan Chase, in 1990.

Lowe died in May 2001, leaving his daughter Thomasina to come to terms with the loss of the photos. When she inspected the damaged box for the first time three months ago, all she found inside was a 'handful of ash' - her forlorn discovery exclusively reported in AP when Thomasina spoke to us within minutes of her trip to the scene on 14 March 2002.

We can now exclusively reveal that around 180 negs – including two of the most well known images - escaped the attacks. The images – most unpublished - were removed from box for printing just days before the terrorists struck, and were due to be returned to the vault sometime after 11 September.

This was to be the only time that Thomasina visited the bank vault following her father's death. A museum in Dallas wanted some JFK prints, and had asked Thomasina to obtain the relevant negatives. One shows JFK's wife, Jackie, wearing a check dress, the other a much published airport photo of JFK. Apart from that, all that is left of Lowe's work are prints, including 300-400 large fine art images produced prior to 11 September from negatives stored in the safe.

Though the bulk of the archive may be lost forever, the story seems far from buried. It has since been confirmed that the lock on the safe containing the negs was missing when Thomasina opened it three month's ago to see if anything remained.

This raised her suspicions that the archive may have been removed by someone, rather than being destroyed in the intense heat that followed the attacks. 'It [the door] was ajar. I literally just had to push it open with my fingers,' says Thomasina, adding that she thought the safe looked in fairly good condition when the bank showed it to her. She says there was a 'hole' where the lock had once been and finds it odd that her father's safe was empty.

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