During John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, Jacques Lowe photographed the candidate at close range; after the election, he continued as Kennedy’s personal photographer, with access to the presidential family and its inner circle. The Kennedy Years: A Memoir brings that sustained proximity into book form, moving between the campaign trail, domestic life with Jacqueline Kennedy and Caroline, work inside the White House, public encounters, and the international stage.

Published by Rizzoli in 2013, the 256-page volume is not structured as a conventional presidential chronicle. Lowe’s photographs are joined to a posthumous first-person account assembled from his oral histories, gallery talks, and speeches. This combination of images and recollection makes the book both a political document and a photographer’s memoir: Kennedy appears as a public figure whose authority was being shaped through photography, but also as a husband, father, and working president observed from unusually near at hand.

The archive behind the book gives these pictures particular historical gravity. Lowe’s 40,000 Kennedy negatives had been stored at the World Trade Center and were destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, shortly after the photographer’s death. His original contact sheets consequently became the surviving photographic record of that body of work. The volume also incorporates material from Lowe’s private files, the Kennedy Archives, and other sources, including photographs previously unseen when the book appeared.

For collectors of documentary photography, presidential history, and the photographic construction of political identity, the book rewards attention less as an inventory of famous moments than as a sustained study of access. Its distinction lies in the tension between intimacy and public performance—and in the way Lowe’s pictures preserve an era when political imagery had not yet assumed the intensive management familiar today.