NEW YORK — Cathy Willens, a pioneering photojournalist who helped advance women’s positions behind the camera everywhere from the Super Bowl to war-torn Somalia during her nearly 45-year career with The Associated Press, died Tuesday at the age of 74.
Willens was diagnosed with ovarian cancer shortly after her retirement in 2021 and died at her Brooklyn home, her nephew, Ben Willens, said.
A supportive colleague but also a fierce competitor who refused to let anything come between her and her photos, Ms. Willens was one of the first women staff photographers for the Associated Press and would go on to take more than 90,000 images, covering presidents and Pope John Paul II, protests and wars, sports triumphs and human tragedies.
“Going through her archives is a journey through history,” said J. David Ake, a former director of photography for The Associated Press who has edited many of Willens’ photos over the past 20 years of his career. That can be a tricky task, given Willens’ tendency to shoot lots of frames.
“But there were always gems in those photos — things she saw that no one else around her noticed,” Ake said in an email.
Willens’s career as a sports photographer was such that when she retired, the New York Yankees paid tribute to her on the field. During a pregame ceremony, manager Aaron Boone presented her with a framed, autographed print of a photo Willens took of former pitcher David Cone after he pitched a perfect game in 1999.
It’s been a long journey since she started in photojournalism in the mid-1970s, when there were very few women in the industry.
“When I covered sports, I was often the only woman on the field,” Willens told BuzzFeed News in 2021. “I didn’t have any role models for me.”
Willens’ interest in cameras was inherited from her father, Lionel, a jewelry store owner and hobbyist who had a darkroom in their home near Detroit, her nephew said. Her mother, Gertrude, was a dental hygienist, and her parents’ various hobbies sometimes merged in unexpected ways, such as when the family gathered to look at slides taken during the holidays.
“When I look at travel photos, sometimes you can see my molars,” Ben Willens says.
Kathy Willens began her career as a freelancer for a suburban Detroit newspaper in 1974. She soon landed a job as a photo lab technician at the now-defunct Miami News, and then as a staff photographer shooting front page photos and other notable images. In 1976, she was hired by the Associated Press.
Based in Miami, Willens covered the 1980 Mariel boat traffic — which saw some 125,000 Cubans cross into the U.S. over a six-month period — and the aftermath of the deadly riots that erupted that same year after four police officers charged with fatally beating a black insurance executive named Arthur McDuffie were acquitted.
She photographed Ronald Reagan during his presidential campaign in 1980, George H. W. Bush fishing in the surf shortly after being elected president eight years later, and the late Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the Bahamas in 1977. One of Willens’s photos that makes up her sports portfolio is of then-world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in a Miami Beach boxing gym.
“For me, sports has the ability to capture these moments of extreme emotion,” Willens told BuzzFeed. “The joy of sports is always there in front of you.”
Over the course of her career, she has covered six Olympics, 11 Super Bowls and countless NBA Finals, World Series and other championships, and one of her proudest moments was when her 1977 photograph of tennis pioneer Billie Jean King appeared on the cover of King’s 2021 autobiography, “All In.”
But Willens was also drawn to stories about Haitian and Cuban immigrants in Florida, and his work became part of an exhibition at the South Florida History Museum in 2004.
After transferring to the AP’s New York headquarters in 1993, Willens was deployed to Somalia during the country’s civil war, where several of his fellow photojournalists were captured and killed. Willens told BuzzFeed News that after returning to New York, he wanted to shoot more local news and sports.
Her New York colleagues and competitors have come to know her as a photographer who just can’t get away from it: No matter what grit, ingenuity, scrum-savvy or know-how it takes, she’ll get in position and take the shot.
“She never turned down a photo. Her photos are simple and precise, but at the same time, they’re just so stunning,” said Peter Morgan, Associated Press business photo editor who worked with Willens for many years, overseeing photo coverage of the New York metropolitan area.
“She was great at finding just the right moment,” he says, “and sometimes I had to look for an extra second to really appreciate her photos, but once I did, it was amazing.”
She did many such projects, as well as an eight-month photo documentary series following mothers incarcerated in New York state prisons. In the last six months of her career, Willens also tried her best to pull off a challenging project about a high school for struggling students, which ultimately proved impossible.
Willens has received numerous journalism awards, including the Associated Press Editor in Chief Award for Excellence in Reporting, and multiple first place finishes in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame photo competitions.
While working for The Associated Press, Willens taught photojournalism as an adjunct professor at New York University for many years, and just a few months ago she met with acquaintances to share her expertise, her nephew said.
She was also an avid birdwatcher and often took photos of the birds she spotted in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Her nephew is planning a memorial service there.
