Joyce Dopkeen, who in 1973 became the first woman hired by The New York Times as a full-time photographer, beginning a 35-year career at the paper, died Tuesday in Rockville, Maryland. He was 80 years old.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by heart failure, said his brother, Jonathan Dopkeen.
Ms. Dopkeen roamed widely with her camera for The Times, whether capturing Muhammad Ali taking on Joe Frazier, inmates training puppies to be service dogs, exuberant children enjoying summers in city parks, or trapeze artist Philippe Petit performing a break for a period of eight years. and a half-minute spike through the Great Falls Gorge in Paterson, NJ, in front of 30,000 spectators.
“The pictures were always a fixed version of the story itself,” Nancy Lee, a former picture editor at The Times, wrote of Ms. Dopkeen in an email. “She knew how to capture the perfect moment.”
After Ms. Dopkeen began working full-time for The Times in 1973, the paper recruited other women to join its ranks as photojournalists, including Teresa Zabala, Marilynn K. Yee and Ruby Washington.
Reflecting on this era in an essay in The Times in 2019, Carolyn Lee, the first woman to head the Times photography department in 1984, wrote: “As revolutions go, this one began quietly and without pretensions in the early 1970s. . It was achieved slowly, one photographer at a time.”
“Over time,” added Ms. Lee, “as more women were hired and gained acceptance, they began to successfully push for the publication of images that were different, for the truths they saw in people and events, for assignments that had previously been denied them and for tasks that were not previously planned.”
Ms. Dopkeen dedicated her entire career to photojournalism after receiving a Polaroid camera as a gift from her parents as a teenager.
“She was instantly intrigued by the notion of capturing people, emotions, and subsequently events and history,” her brother said in an email.
Joyce Harriet Dopkeen was born on October 23, 1942 in Worcester, Massachusetts. His father, Saul Kahn Dopkeen, was a pediatrician. His mother, Lillian (Cobin) Dopkeen, was an artist.
After graduating from the Howard School for Girls in Massachusetts, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in photojournalism from Boston University’s School of Public Communications in 1964.
Unlike many women who had majored in journalism at the time and had difficulty finding full-time work, Ms. Dopkeen landed a job immediately after graduation, with The Montgomery County Sentinel in Rockville, Maryland. She joined the Boston Globe as a photographer in 1967. , winning first place in the Massachusetts United Press International photography contest in two categories, personality and reporting. He left The Globe in 1970.
Miss Dopkeen won a front-page award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 1974 for her photograph of Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York showering his aides with champagne as he prepared to leave office.
He left The Times in 2008 and lived in Ossining, NY, until several years ago, when he moved to the Washington area to be closer to family.
Besides his brother, she has survived by his sister, Leslie Dopkeen.
Regardless of whether a picture is worth a thousand words, Ms. Dopkeen understood that an article could be updated, rewritten and edited, but an image was frozen in time.
“It’s one thing for a reporter to miss a quote,” he said in 2019. “They can get a quote from somebody, but if a photographer misses it, that’s all they wrote.”
