One of the most important newspaper photographers of the 20th century was William A. Kuenzel, the pioneering chief Detroit News photographer from 1901 until his retirement in 1953.
As a 14-year-old in 1899, Kuenzel sold the News a photo of a Ford automobile on East Grand Boulevard. Two years later, the paper hired him as its first staff photographer.
On June 18, 1912, Kuenzel was pictured (above, right) sitting next to pilot Walter Brookins in a Burgess-Wright hydroairplane, cradling his camera as he prepared to capture the first aerial photos ever taken by a Detroit photojournalist.
That day, he developed 12 glass negative exposures of views from over the Detroit River. Kuenzel later took hundreds of aerial photos from the Detroit News airplane, “The Early Bird,” and the paper’s autogiro (the latter of which is on display at the Henry Ford Museum). Both also transported reporters to the scenes of breaking stories.
Throughout his long career, Kuenzel photographed eight U.S. presidents — from Theodore Roosevelt to Harry Truman — every Tigers opening game from 1901 to 1952, major news events, and countless luminaries in show business, sports, and politics.
Reportedly the first to take a baseball action picture, Kuenzel’s most famous photograph, a 1909 image of Ty Cobb sliding hard into third base, helped clear the “Georgia Peach” of claims that he had intentionally spiked Philadelphia’s Frank “Home Run” Baker. The inventive photographer designed a special long-range camera called the “Big Bertha” for the newspaper, which later sold dozens of the cameras to newspapers nationwide.
During Detroit’s 250th birthday celebration in 1951, the Detroit Press Photographers Association honored Kuenzel at a banquet in observance of his 50th year with the News, and the city council passed a resolution celebrating Kuenzel’s work. Upon retiring on Jan. 1, 1953, he had left behind a magnificent visual record of the people and events that shaped the city in the first half of the 20th century.
Kuenzel died in March 1964 at age 79 in Miami, where he had retired. He was survived by his wife, Rose, who died nine months later; his daughter, Beatrice; and his son, Bill, a prominent photographer for the Miami Herald.
This story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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