Michael Evans, a photojournalist who took some of the best-known and beloved photographs of Ronald Reagan from the time Reagan sought the Republican nomination for president in 1975 through the end of Reagan’s first term as president in 1985, died Thursday at his home in Atlanta. He was 61.
His wife, Story, said the cause was cancer.
His 1975 portrait of a smiling Reagan wearing a cowboy hat appeared on the cover of Newsweek, Time and People magazines the week of the president’s funeral in June 2004.
He was Reagan’s personal photographer beginning in 1980.
The son of a Canadian diplomat, he went to boarding school in Ontario, where he started photographing campus sports events for the Port Hope Evening Guide at age 15.
He got his first full-time job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer in Ohio in the early 1960s. From there he went to The New York Times, where he was a staff photographer until he joined Time magazine in 1974.
Mr. Evans often recounted that he was impressed by Reagan from the first time he saw him in the early 1970s when the then-governor of California spoke at Yale University.
In 1982, Mr. Evans started a portrait project that resulted in pictures of several hundred of Washington’s government leaders and other workers. “People and Power: Portraits from the Federal Village” became an exhibition of the Corcoran Gallery and a book in 1985.
