In May of 1954, Orlando Suero, a photographer with the Three Lions Picture Agency on his first major assignment, spent five days with the Kennedys. He enjoyed their full cooperation and the intimate access that would later, as Jacqueline became more anxious about her family's privacy, be denied to all but a few.

 

In more than twenty photo sessions, Suero documented a typical week in the young couple's life: Jack at his Senate office, catching up on work at home, and painting in the back garden; Jackie attending classes at Georgetown, gardening, and preparing for an evening of dinner and dancing; and the couple reading the morning papers around the breakfast table, looking through their wedding photos, hosting both casual and formal dinner parties, and tossing the football around with neighbors Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.

Suero'sphotographs capture the idyllic quality of the young couple's lives during their months in Georgetown. Not yet hounded by the media, John and Jacqueline in these images seem happier and more at ease than they would ever be again. Surprisingly, no magazine ever published Suero's complete photo essay.

McCall's ran a few of his photographs that fall, but most of them have not been seen until now. In 1989, Three Lions Picture Agency owner Max Lowenherz donated the photographs to the Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute. For Camelot at Dawn, the Peabody Institute's Anne Garside has selected nearly one hundred of the most evocative and affecting pictures Suero took during his week in Georgetown. This remarkable document of John and Jacqueline Kennedy's first year of marriage recalls the romance and the promise embodied by their life together in America's last age of innocence.