Kathy Willens, pathbreaking Associated Press photographer who captured sports and more, dies at 74

Kathy Willens, a pathbreaking photojournalist who helped cement women's place behind the lens everywhere from the Super Bowl to war-torn Somalia during her nearly 45-year career at The Associated Press, died Tuesday. She was 74.

Willens died at her Brooklyn home of ovarian cancer, diagnosed shortly after her 2021 retirement, said her nephew Ben Willens.

A giving colleague but fierce competitor who brooked no interference between her and a picture, Willens was among the AP’s first female staff photographers. She went on to shoot more than 90,000 images — of presidents and Pope John Paul II, protests and war, sports triumphs and human tragedy.

“A stroll through her archive is a stroll through history,” said former AP Director of Photography J. David Ake, who edited many of Willens' pictures over the last two decades of her career. It could be a challenging task, given her penchant for shooting a lot of frames.

“But in those images, there was always a gem. Something she saw, that no one around her did,” Ake said by email.

Specializing in sports, Willens became a photographer of such stature that the New York Yankees paid tribute to her on the field when she retired. In a pre-game ceremony, team manager Aaron Boone gave her a framed print, signed by former pitcher David Cone, of her own photo of him after he threw a perfect game in 1999.

It had been a long path from her introduction to photojournalism in the mid-1970s, when there were few women in the business.

“When covering sports, I was almost always the only female on the field,” Willens told Buzzfeed News in 2021. “There were no role models for me.”

Willens developed her interest in cameras from her father, Lionel, a jewelry store owner and hobbyist photographer who kept a darkroom in their Detroit-area home, her nephew said. Her mother, Gertrude, was a dental hygienist, and the parents' various pursuits would sometimes blend in unexpected ways, such as when the family gathered to view slides from a vacation.

“We’d be looking at pictures of trips, and every now and then, you’d see some molars,” Ben Willens said.

Kathy Willens got her professional start as a freelancer for suburban Detroit newspapers in 1974. She soon landed a job at the now-gone The Miami News as a photo lab technician, then as a staff photographer, racking up front-page and other prominent pictures. The AP hired her in 1976.

Working from Miami, Willens covered the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when nearly 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. in six months, and the aftermath of deadly rioting that occurred the same year after the acquittal of four police officers charged with fatally beating a Black insurance executive named Arthur McDuffie.

She photographed Ronald Reagan campaigning to become president in 1980, George H.W. Bush surf-fishing shortly after winning the office eight years later, and Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth II visiting the Bahamas in 1977. And in one of the images that would build Willens' sports portfolio, she captured then-world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali at a Miami Beach boxing gym.

“For me, sports has the ability to capture these moments of extreme emotion,” Willens told Buzzfeed. “The joy of it, it’s right there in front of you all the time.”

Over her career, she would cover six Olympics, 11 Super Bowls and countless NBA finals, World Series and other championships. Among her points of pride was seeing a 1977 photo she made of tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King grace the cover of King’s 2021 autobiography ”All In.”

Yet Willens also was drawn to stories about Florida's Haitian and Cuban immigrants, work that would become part of an exhibition at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in 2004.

After transferring to AP's New York headquarters in 1993, she was dispatched to Somalia in the throes of its civil war. Some of Willens' fellow photojournalists were captured and killed covering the country around that time, and Willens told Buzzfeed that after returning to New York, she decided she wanted to shoot more news and sports closer to home.

Her New York coworkers and competitors got to know her as a photographer who could not be kept out of the picture. She would get into position and get her shot, whatever grit, ingenuity, scrum-savvy and know-how it took.

“She just would not be denied a picture. And her photography was just simple and precise, but really exquisite, at the same time," said AP business photo editor Peter Morgan, who worked with Willens for years while overseeing photo coverage of the New York metro area.

“She was just really good at finding the right moment,” he said. "Sometimes you had to look at her pictures for an extra second to really get them. But once you saw them, you got how brilliant they were.”

She would do plenty of that, plus such projects as an eight-month-long documentary photo series on mothers in New York state prisons. Even during the last six months of her career, Willens put her all into trying to pull off a difficult project, about a high school for struggling students, that ultimately proved impossible.

Willens earned a roster of journalism awards, including an Associated Press Managing Editors Award for Reportorial Excellence and multiple wins in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame photo competitions.

While working at AP, Willens for years taught photojournalism as an adjunct professor at New York University. Even a few months ago, she was meeting with an acquaintance to share her expertise, her nephew said.

She was also a keen birder, often making pictures of her finds in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Her nephew plans a memorial service there.