Tames, who died at 75 last week while undergoing heart surgery in Washington, D.C., was responsible for many of the best-known photographs of presidents and world leaders taken this century. President Eisenhower selected two Tames shots as official portraits, and another was the model for the six-cent stamp bearing his likeness. In one of Tames’s most famous photographs, President Kennedy stands silhouetted in the Oval Office, hunched over his desk, the weight of the world seemingly on his shoulders. Such a picture couldn’t be taken today. “The spontaneous nature of the photographs I made of presidents can never be repeated because of White House security restrictions,” Tames lamented in his 1990 memoir “Eye on Washington.” Even without restrictions, Tames’s work would be hard to match.
