Howard Baker 1925 – 2014: Photographer, United States Senator, Ambassador

Howard Baker, 18 years United States Senator from Tennessee, Republican Majority Leader, widely respected by Democrats & Republicans as “the quintessential mediator, negotiator and moderator,” Chief of Staff to President Ronald Reagan, Ambassador to Japan under President George W. Bush, and award-winning Photographer has died aged 88 in his Huntsville, Tennessee home of complications from a stroke Saturday, 21 June 2014.

He said of his photographic hobby that it “may be the only place where I can reasonably aspire to perfection.”

Mr. Baker began his photographic hobby as a Boy Scout, and was renown for his pride in his imaging work.

The variety of his images were myriad, had equally compelling perspectives, which ranged from the rostrum of the Senate Watergate Committee, to the campaign trail as a 1980 presidential candidate in New Hampshire, to the Oval Office, as a passenger aboard Marine One lifting off from the White House South Lawn, to the inner sanctums of the Vatican, and in Red Square where he snapped frames of President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. His camera was an integral a part of his life which he used to document his experiences from a uniquely intimate perspective as participant-turned-observer.

Longtime aide longtime aide Tom Griscom said that Mr. Baker’s photography was “his way of writing and capturing the moments in life that are important to him,” and that “His diary, rather than in words, is in pictures. He was a part-time politician but a full-time photographer.”

http://howardbakerphotography.com/gallery/index.php