[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 133 (Wednesday, September 21, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 21, 1994]



                   HONORING THE LATE HARRY NALTCHAYAN

  Mr. DURENBERGER. Mr. President, man's quest to capture time has taken 
many forms over the ages. Over the last century, the frozen music known 
as photography has been a major art seeking to capture forever what 
once was--and thus to show us to ourselves.
  Harry Naltchayan, who died last week, shared with a whole city--
indeed, with the whole world--his irrepressible joy in the magic of his 
craft. It takes more than just pointing a camera to capture a reality 
for all time--you have to have an insight into people that tells you 
what's really important. Only if you truly understand people can you 
hope to make a picture that will last--one that will have a resonance 
in your own heart and the hearts of others.
  Harry had this gift.
  From the moment I first met him 16 years ago--he asked ``May I make a 
picture?''--I have loved Harry. I mourn his passing--and yet I know 
that his body of work will live forever.
  I ask unanimous consent that Martha Sherrill's appreciation of Harry 
Naltchayan in last Saturday's Washington Post be included in the Record 
at the conclusion of my remarks.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1994]

                   The Photographer Who Made Us Smile

                          (By Martha Sherrill)

       If you went to a party with Harry, the world smiled at you. 
     The grumpiest people. The worst people. The self-serious and 
     pompous, the mean, the petty, the self-righteous, the 
     overworldly, the indicted. People caught sight of Harry 
     Naltchayan--with his elegant clothes and inelegant cameras--
     and their faces lifted, their shoulders relaxed. They seemed 
     lighter, easier-going, relieved from something. They seemed 
     able to shake off the flop-sweats of some higher office and 
     the dreary burden of the social occasion, as though the 
     atmosphere around Harry were made of laughing gas or ether. 
     Harry was a tonic. He was a miracle. He generated so many 
     good feelings he was like a proximity bomb of life and spirit 
     and affection.
       It's so unlike him to be dead.
       Harry Naltchayan was best known as the ever-present society 
     photographer for The Washington Post, in fact, the society 
     photographer in Washington from the days when such things 
     mattered greatly until yesterday, when he died of a heart 
     attack. But he was also as remarkable as the people he shot.
       It wasn't just Harry's camera that made people smile, or 
     the hope that his artful pictures might grace the front of 
     the style section the next morning, immortalizing their 
     importance, endowing, exaggerating a moment in time, the 
     champagne forever bubbling in flutes, the salmon forever 
     smoked on the platter, the Scotch forever splashing in 
     tumblers. People smiled at Harry Naltchayan because when you 
     looked at that smile you couldn't not smile yourself.
       Because, besides being blithe, debonair and beautiful, 
     Harry Naltchayan was also a human being--a busy newsguy who 
     always asked about your family, who cheerfully remembered the 
     names of presidential aides four administrations away, who 
     loved his job, who seemed to care about everybody, who never 
     hid his feelings behind his camera, and who always tried to 
     use the most flattering picture.
       And soon enough, around Harry, important people would find 
     themselves becoming human beings too. Around Harry, they 
     began touching, hugging, mugging, vamping, kissing, and 
     turning their perfectly coiffed but now slightly sweaty heads 
     toward his camera lens. Why not be happy? It was a party! So 
     there they were, Melvin Laird and Cap Weinberger--smiling! 
     Jody Powell and Bud McFarlane--smiling! Mike Deaver and Ralph 
     Nader--smiling! Nixon and Ford and Carter and Reagan and Bush 
     and Clinton smiled too, and silly Cabinet secretaries and 
     chiefs of staff, dusty ambassadors and Washington waxworks, 
     the new people, the old people, the soon to be famous and the 
     already forgotten.
       Harry was the opening act. The party reporter was the 
     closer. One-two punch. ``He had an incredible way of making 
     people relax,'' remember Sally Quinn. ``For me it was great, 
     because Harry would come in and soften them up--and then I 
     would move in for the kill.''
       I didn't come to know Harry until the summer of 1989, when 
     we covered the 70th birthday party of Malcolm Forbes together 
     in Morocco. I remember being somewhat in a panic, nervous and 
     new at covering parties, new at covering anything, and 
     mesmerized by Harry. On the plane to Tangier, I kept hearing 
     his chuckle in the back row, kept turning around to look at 
     him, smiling hugely, chatting it up with Mort Zuckerman and 
     Katharine Graham, and making friends so fast I started 
     feeling like an imposter. Who was this guy?
       It was in Tangier that I came to see what Harry was all 
     about. He looked after me. He interviewed people in all sorts 
     of languages. He dragged me over to meet Henry Kissinger. He 
     passed along hilarious gossip. He also bought me cigarettes, 
     in the middle of the night, when I was on deadline.
       He noticed everything, overheard everything. Harry often 
     knew the news, and the news sources, far better than the 
     reporters. ``He could drive you crazy while you were 
     conducting a ticklish interview by reminding the subject when 
     last the two of them had met,'' says writer Ken Ringle. 
     ``Sometimes it would break a train of questions you were 
     trying to follow and screw things up. But other times he 
     would prompt an on-the-record comment you could never have 
     gotten.''
       He had a continental accent, perfect manners and perpetual 
     tan. His hair was white. His shoulders were straight and 
     broad. It was as if he'd come from another time, another 
     planet, a place where people treated each other like friends, 
     like family, not mere names in the news to be ignored and 
     discarded when the news changed.
       Because nobody ever became a nobody to Harry. Sure he knew 
     that nothing lasted, especially in Washington. But in a town 
     where today's bigwig was tomorrow's third-rate lobbyist, 
     Harry made friends and kept them. On one assignment, he 
     confided to writer Elizabeth Kastor that he frequently took 
     pictures of people with no intention of printing them--
     sometimes shooting away with no film in his camera.
       Why?
       ``It makes them feel good.''

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