Portraits Art: Kennedy Family on beach, Hyannis Port, 1959 (Caroline overhead)

Even before JFK was elected president in 1960, they had attained the status of celebrities. Images of the young, glamorous, and good-looking couple were in high demand. Mark Shaw was a photojournalist and fashion photographer who became close with the Kennedys in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He went on to serve, albeit unofficially, as the Kennedy family photographer throughout the presidency. On assignment by Life magazine, Shaw took this photograph of then Senator Kennedy, his wife, and daughter at the beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 1959.

Shaw’s black and white photograph shows John Kennedy lying on his back at the beach’s edge. With his knees bent, his slacks are hiked up to reveal white socks. His shoes cross the line into the water. Arms upraised, Kennedy strikes a playful pose, lifting his two-year-old daughter Caroline into the air. To the left, and slightly behind the father-daughter pair, Jackie Kennedy looks on. Her pose is relaxed and her pants legs wet, presumably from a walk in the surf.

Taken out of context, the photo seems like a charming and even ordinary image of family life. The fact that the family is the Kennedys, however, makes the scene remarkable and the careless abandon of the moment becomes revelatory. In the 1950s politicians enjoyed a much higher degree of personal privacy than their counterparts do today. For a presidential hopeful to appear candidly, lying on the ground, playing with his daughter at his family’s private retreat would have seemed thrillingly intimate and endearing to the public who saw this picture. The portrait, however, is not as candid as it seems. Although the family appears to ignore the camera, they were well aware of its presence. In fact, they had invited Shaw to photograph them. This private, touching moment is, then, essentially staged and performed.

The long history of European ruler and state portraits from which presidential portraiture in the U.S. derived was marked, even at its most casual, by a sense of rigid formality. In Shaw’s image and similar photographs taken during JFK’s presidential years, this tradition is turned upside down. Kennedy is presented as familiar and relatable. To argue on this basis, as some might, that such images are not portraits, is to fail to recognize the conscious self-presentation behind them.