1000’s of Kansas City pictures from the Sixties and 70s discover a new residence | KCUR

Photographer Raymond Corey’s day on October 11, 1965, began with a crackly announcement that got here throughout the police scanner: A theft was in progress at Brotherhood State Bank.

The financial institution was solely half a block from the Kansas City Kansan newspaper places of work, so Corey grabbed his digital camera and ran out the door to seize the scene on movie.

Friend and longtime Kansas City information photographer Roy Inman nonetheless remembers the dramatic {photograph} Corey captured.

“The police have the bank robber on the ground,” Inman recalled. “He’s flat on his face, the money is in the foreground, and you’ve got a cop on the left and a cop on the right, and they have him handcuffed.”

The newspaper wire service United Press International picked up the picture and the picture was reproduced across the nation. The {photograph} was so excellent, Inman mentioned, readers referred to as within the subsequent day considering it had been staged.

“Steven Spielberg could not pose it any better for a film, and here Ray just got right down there,” Inman mentioned. “He’s like six inches from the guy’s gun, the cops are like a foot or two away, and they’ve got handcuffs.”

The picture of the failed theft helped launch Corey’s 15-year profession, and a black and white print of it’s included in a brand new pictures exhibit that opened final month on the State Historical Society of Missouri on the University of Missouri, Kansas City, referred to as “Through the Lens: Photographs of Raymond Corey.”

As a workers photographer for the Kansas City Kansan and the Kansas City Star from 1965 to 1980, Corey photographed Midwestern occasions massive and small.

He photographed National Guardsmen on the streets of Kansas City within the aftermath of unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and was there to seize the wave of antiwar protests at a 1970 “Teach-In” at UMKC. Corey was within the crowd at Kemper Arena when the 1976 Republican National Convention nominated Gerald Ford for president and U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, from Kansas, for vp.

Corey additionally took photos of quiet, behind-the-scenes moments: an exhausted competitor snoozing between two cows on the American Royal, and a dancer leaping on the garden of Starlight Theatre.

His daughter Lee Wadsworth mentioned she remembers her father usually grabbing his digital camera bag earlier than hustling off to assignments when she was rising up.

“It was not an eight to five job, and it was not a Monday through Friday job,” Wadsworth mentioned. “Any time there was any kind of major gathering, whether it was for a convention or the opening of the airport, that’s what he did.”

After Corey’s loss of life in 1995 at age 59, Wadsworth and her three siblings needed to verify her father’s legacy and the historical past he captured was preserved, so she reached out to the State Historical Society of Missouri to see in the event that they is perhaps concerned with his archive.

“He had all these boxes of negatives and we needed to do something with them,” Wadsworth mentioned. “We’ve been really, really blessed that they have this home, and they know what to do with them.”

The Corey household donated virtually 50,000 negatives from his time working for newspapers.

Whitney Heinzmann, coordinator of the historic society’s analysis heart, mentioned they had been excited so as to add them to the gathering.

Until just lately, Corey’s images weren’t readily accessible to most of the people, however Heinzmann commissioned earlier this yr the digitization of 8,000 negatives from the Raymond E. Corey photo collection. The high-resolution, archival high quality pictures are actually on-line for researchers.

“It was a large undertaking,” Heinzmann mentioned. “We got the materials digitized, and then staff came through and added metadata so it could go up on the website.”

Heinzmann mentioned that she hopes the brand new exhibit will assist get the phrase out in regards to the everlasting assortment. Staff created 4 floor-to-ceiling banners on the analysis heart to advertise the exhibit, showcasing 50 of Corey’s images.

“It was very difficult to choose,” Heinzmann mentioned. “There are some great images, and he covered such a wide area of topics and geographic locations in the Kansas City region.”

The exhibit additionally contains artifacts from Corey’s lengthy profession, together with a congratulatory letter from the National Press Photographer’s Association saying a nationwide award for his {photograph} of the failed financial institution theft, a number of black and white prints and a press cross from a Midwestern Governor’s Conference held in 1969.

“I know this is just a tiny bit of what’s in the collection,” Wadsworth mentioned. “Hopefully this will encourage others to get into it.”

“Through the Lens: Photographs of Raymond Corey” runs by way of Dec. 19, 2025, on the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Kansas City Research Center in Miller Nichols Library, 800 E. 51st St., Room 306, Kansas City, Missouri 64110. For extra info, go to SHSMO.org.