McNamee, Wally

Wally McNamee began his association with the news business in 1950 as a copy boy for the Washington Post and learned the technical aspects of photography while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. When the Post rehired him in 1955, McNamee began a career as a photojournalist that would span more than forty years. McNamee moved to Newsweek magazine in 1968 and began covering news events in Washington. Later in his career, he was the photographer for Newsweek 's Special Projects Unit, which won a National Magazine Award for "Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us, " an investigation ten years after the conflict into the lives of people who had served in Vietnam. McNamee also covered the Olympics from 1976 to 1996 and participated in the Day in the Life book projects in Australia, the USSR, Spain, the United States, and China. During the span of his career, McNamee produced more than one hundred cover photographs for Newsweek .

McNamee, a four-time winner of the coveted White House News Photographers' Association Photographer of the Year Award, received the Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. He lives with his wife, Nikki, in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

From the guide to the Wally McNamee Photographic Archive, AR2002-011; 2002-027; 2002-097; 2002-180; 2003-032; 2003-085., ca. 1955-2000, (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin)