Edward Keating, who for additional than a month did whatever it took, even disguising himself as a worker, to photograph the wreckage at ground zero immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, contributing to a human body of work that introduced The New York Times a Pulitzer Prize for pictures for its 9/11 protection, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 65.
His wife, Carrie Keating, mentioned the lead to was cancer, which Mr. Keating experienced attributed to the days and nights he expended inhaling toxic dust amid the ruins of the World Trade Middle.
Mr. Keating’s enterprising spirit as a photographer sometimes received him in problems. In the 1990s, although masking the Kosovo war, he was seized by the Serbian authorities immediately after crossing the Albanian border to get a superior angle. His efforts to get obtain to ground zero led to his arrest for legal trespass.
And as a freelancer for The Instances covering racial violence in the Crown Heights part of Brooklyn in 1991, he was crushed by a team of adult men wielding pipes and bats. The Times’s government editor at the time, Max Frankel, despatched him a fruit basket. Two months later, the paper gave Mr. Keating a whole-time occupation.
Mr. Keating could be unflinching in his perform, photographing men and women utilizing challenging medication, for example. But he could also be delicate, capturing intimate times in between couples at a bar or at the Metropolitan Opera.
He preferred to juxtapose harshness and delicacy. There was his portrait of a bodybuilder, his bulging biceps as big as his head, lying on a bed’s pink floral blanket. And there was his near-up of a tea established, completely intact but encrusted in ash, in an condominium reverse where by one particular of the Twin Towers experienced stood. It was among the the shots that earned The Moments the Pulitzer for breaking news pictures.
Howell Raines, The Situations govt editor who oversaw the 9/11 coverage, advised Matt Lauer of the “Today” exhibit that the tea established photo was “the legendary image” of New York soon after the terrorist assaults.
With his hand-rolled cigarettes, normal stubble and a Leica slung about his neck, Mr. Keating could give off a roguish air. Some colleagues regarded him “a talented if mercurial lensman who at times behaved like a hotdogger,” the journalist Lloyd Grove wrote in The Washington Submit in 2003. Mr. Keating acknowledged to The Submit that he experienced two times been suspended by The Periods for infractions unrelated to his get the job done. His images led to a last dust-up with the paper.
In 2002, two photojournalists for other information retailers publicly complained that they had observed Mr. Keating phase a photograph of a boy aiming a toy gun in Lackawanna, N.Y., near Buffalo. Mr. Keating and a Instances reporter ended up there to report on a group of neighborhood gentlemen whom the authorities explained as an Al Qaeda terrorist mobile. The boy, who was not associated to the gentlemen, was photographed beside a indicator marketing “Arabian Foodstuff.”
The episode prompted a debate in the information media about journalistic ethics and a extensive editor’s note in The Instances, which concluded that “the boy’s gesture had not been spontaneous” and that the photograph violated the Times’s policy on journalistic integrity.
Mr. Keating before long remaining the paper. He explained to The Post that he experienced been “falsely accused of obtaining set up a photograph.” But he also acknowledged that he may possibly have influenced the boy in the photograph. “I prompt persons to do points by planting a seed,” the trade publication Image District Information quoted him as indicating, “otherwise I’m subject matter to what they do randomly. It is portion of the craft.”
Edward Nicholas Keating Jr. was born on March 4, 1956, in Greenwich, Conn. His father was an executive with the rubber company B.F. Goodrich his mom, Gloria (Haupt) Keating, was a homemaker and beginner photographer.
Eddie was a boy when Edward Sr. died of a heart attack and a teen when his mother killed herself. By the time he graduated from New Canaan Substantial University in Connecticut, the task of elevating him and his two youthful brothers experienced fallen to his sister, Cynthia McClanaghan, who was in her early 20s and newly married.
Mr. Keating attended American University in Washington but “burned out” just after a few alcoholic many years there, he as soon as advised the journal Martha’s Winery Arts & Thoughts. He bought sober on Sept. 25, 1977, and by no means had a different drink, he explained.
He gave university yet another attempt at Columbia University, but a $400 tax split impressed him to try a unique route. He acquired a 35-millimeter Ricoh camera and began educating himself photography.
He married Carrie Boretz, a fellow photographer, in 1988. In addition to his wife, Mr. Keating is survived by two daughters, Caitlin and Emily Keating his sister and his brothers, Kevin and Robert. He died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Most cancers Center and lived on the Higher West Side of Manhattan.
Right after leaving The Moments, Mr. Keating spent 15 a long time doing the job on “Main Road: The Missing Aspiration of Route 66,” a images reserve about just one of America’s most storied streets. As a young male, he had arrived at “rock bottom” in a low-cost resort alongside Route 66 and “experienced the epiphany of total defeat,” he wrote in the ebook. That was when he give up ingesting.
“The damnable highway that practically ruined me,” he included, “somehow saved me.”
