[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 20 (Tuesday, March 1, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       WE WILL MISS GEORGE TAMES

  Mr. PELL. Mr. President, as many of my colleagues know, George Tames 
died last week after a lifetime of recording Washington's political 
events and personalities with his camera. He will be sorely missed.
  I rise to share with my colleagues an excellent appreciation of 
George Tames, written by Howell Raines, that ran in last Sunday's New 
York Times, February 27, 1994. I know that I personally will miss him.
  Accompanying that article was one of his celebrated pictures of 
Lyndon Johnson lecturing my predecessor, Theodore Francis Green.
  George, who photographed 11 Presidents during nearly a half-century 
as a Washington-based photographer for the New York Times, was both an 
exceptionally talented photographer and a delightful person.
  He was justifiably known as a consumate storyteller and that skill 
was captured and remains available to us in his book, ``Eye on 
Washington: Presidents Who Have Known Me.''
  It will be difficult for us to look around and not see him recording 
events at the next meeting of the men and women who shape our Nation's 
policy. We will miss both him and his exceptional work.
  I ask unanimous consent that the following article from the Sunday 
New York Times be printed in the Congressional Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            [From the Sunday New York Times, Feb. 27, 1994]

                      The Artistry of George Tames

                           (By Howell Raines)

       Newspaper journalism takes place within rigid stylistic 
     guidelines. Even so, there are a handful of writers and 
     photographers who manage, within those strict limits, to 
     create work that rises to the level of art. George Tames, the 
     Times photographer who died on Wednesday at the age of 75, 
     was such a person.
       Even into his 70's, George could run and gun with the best 
     young shooters. But every now and then his Nikon--or, in the 
     old days, his Speed Graphic-- would spit out an image that 
     you knew would outlast the issue of the paper in which it 
     appeared.
       George was an interesting man to look at and to listen to. 
     You had to like to listen because he could talk the horns off 
     a billy goat. He had an artist's ego and the artist's eye to 
     back it up. In the 55 years of photographing Washington, 
     George earned the right to strut. When George told me he was 
     writing his autobiography, I suggested that he call it 
     ``Presidents Who Have Known Me.'' I meant it as a joke. 
     George made that the subtitle.
       He was not an orderly man about preserving his work. Some 
     of his best images were rescued from obscurity because Susan 
     Woodley Raines, my former wife, took the trouble to catalogue 
     a pile of prints and negatives in George and Fran Tames's 
     basement. One of those photographs, a picture of Lyndon 
     Johnson browbeating Senator Theodore Francis Green, hangs in 
     my office. I was sitting in front of it on the sad day when 
     two of George's favorite people on The Times, Carolyn Lee and 
     Jose Lopez, came with news that he had died during heart 
     surgery.
       In that moment, I was thinking less of George's photographs 
     than of Tames Rock in the Potomac. That was what we called a 
     jagged gray boulder upstream from Fletcher's Boat House. 
     George had stood on that rock and fished for herring, shad 
     and striped bass every spring of his life from the time he 
     was a small boy. He took me there one spring morning two 
     years ago and let me cast from his rock. Just after daylight 
     I hooked a big fish that got away.
       For the first spring in over 60 years, George will not 
     stand on Tames Rock. He was a good fisherman, but he was a 
     better photographer. When he pointed his camera, the big ones 
     did not get away. You can call that art and no one who knows 
     this business will argue.

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