Diana Walker

Washington, DC

Diana Walker is a photojournalist known for covering the White House for TIME Magazine for over twenty years. Beginning as a contract photographer near the end of the Ford administration, Walker captured the presidential lives of the Carters, the Reagans, the Bushes, and the Clintons. She is the author of three books, Public & Private: Twenty Years Photographing the Presidency, The Bigger Picture: 30 Years of Portraits, and Hillary: The Photographs of Diana Walker – which chronicled Hillary Clinton as she moved from First Lady to Senator to Presidential candidate and later as Secretary of State. Walker’s work has been recognized by the World Press, the National Press Photographers Association, and the White House News Photographers Association. Her photographs have been featured in numerous prominent magazines, including, but not limited to, Vanity Fair, People, Paris Match, Life, Fortune, and New York Magazine.

Walker’s career was not limited to the confines of five presidential administrations. She worked with many notable Americans, photographing some in-depth over many years. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, Anna Deavere Smith, playwright, performing artist, and the plaintiffs in the Prop 8 case out of California are just a few such examples. Walker has received multiple awards, including the National Portrait Gallery’s Paul Peck Presidential Award for her interpretation and portrayal of the American Presidency (2003), the Henry Luce Life Achievement Award from Time, Inc. (2013), and the WHNPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2023). Walker’s photographs can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which honored her with a retrospective of her work, “Diana Walker/Photojournalist” in 2003. Walker’s photographic archive is housed at the Briscoe Center for American History, where images and materials from her archive are displayed in the exhibit “Through Her Lens: The Photojournalism of Diana Walker” in the main exhibition space through August of 2024.