Karen Gaines

Valley Village, CA

Karen Gaines is a longtime editor of photography. She served in that capacity at several Time Inc. magazines, where she worked closely with some of the foremost photojournalists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 2016, as photography turned digital, the need to preserve the best of their work in film prompted her to co-found the non-profit Photography Collections Preservation Project. Since then PCPP has placed work at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, American University and most of all the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which now has the work of John Dominis, Christopher Little, Danielle Weil, Ben Martin, and the Philip and Edith Leonian Archive. Also at Briscoe are collections of the work of David Hume Kennerly, Robert McNeely and Matthew Nathons, who were among the photographers Karen assigned to make the official record of President Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration. Karen holds a BFA in Photography from Tufts University and an MFA from Pratt Institute in Information and Library Science. She and her husband James R. Gaines, the former editor of Time, Life, and People magazines, have four no-longer-young children and two grandchildren. She currently serves as Chief of Mission for the Matthew Perry Foundation.