Courier Journal great Bill Luster, ‘the most beloved person in all of photography,' dies

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Bill Luster, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for The Courier Journal and member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, died Thursday after battling the types of diseases that come with being older. He was 80.
He used light and a camera to tell stories in the newspaper in such a way that few could equal.
Whether it was Barack and Michelle Obama sneaking a quick dance outside the White House's Blue Room, or a dog stretching while country folk gathered in lawn chairs under a shade tree, Luster had a knack for conveying an entire story in a single frame.
'He operated in such a quiet way, I don't think he ever forced his way into a situation,' said Jay Mather, a former Courier Journal photographer who shared the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting with reporter Joel Brinkley. 'He gained the trust of subjects easily because of his quiet manner.'
Standing just 4'11', Luster was a giant in the world of photojournalism — a world where he used his height as an advantage.
He loved to tell the story of when actor John Wayne visited Louisville in 1976 to be grand marshal of the Pegasus Parade. Luster met his plane at the airport and as Wayne climbed off the plane, Luster scrambled backward as he shot.
'He got about 10 feet away, knelt down and said, 'How's this, little pardner,'' Luster wrote in 2008. 'So I do have some advantages, and I still treasure that picture.'
Back in the days before digital photography, when photographers had to print pictures using a device called a photo enlarger, Luster needed to stand on a stool — known as a 'Luster Lifter' — to see what he was doing.
His photos had a unique perspective both literally and figuratively.
Michael Clevenger, The Courier Journal's director of photography, said when he was a young photographer he figured out that talented photographers at the newspaper like Luster didn't necessarily love what they were shooting, but 'what they really loved was telling the best story they could through photos — and Bill was a master at that.'
Photographers, Clevenger said, often have just one chance — and a small rectangular box — to tell a story. 'What Bill did best was he used that entire rectangle. Edge to edge, he told stories. … I'm always amazed at how good he was at protecting that space.'
In 2010, Luster won the Joseph Sprague Award, the highest honor in American photojournalism, from the National Press Photographers Association. He also won the Joseph Costa Award for Innovative leadership from that organization.
C. Thomas Hardin, a longtime photographer and director of photography at the CJ, said Luster had skills few other photographers could claim back in the days before auto-focus camera lenses were available.
"He was a great sports photographer," Hardin said. "He had terrific eye-hand coordination. ... He had the ability to follow-focus as the action happened in front of him. Very few people had the innate ability he had."
Over the years, Luster was named Sports Photographer of the Year and the Visual Journalist of the Year by the Kentucky News Photographers Association.
In 1982, he was named runner-up for Newspaper Photographer of the Year from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism.
Over the years, he gained exclusive access to the White House under several U.S. presidents, including Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Barack Obama — and he shot photographs of every president from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Obama.
Luster had two photo essays appear in The National Geographic magazine — the holy grail of news photographers — and had images published in Time and Newsweek, according to his website.
Sam Abell, who worked for National Geographic for more than 30 years and has known Luster since he was a photo intern at The Courier Journal in the late 1960s, said Luster's piece on organ transplants was the "single most difficult story anyone had ever done for National Geographic" both in terms of subject matter and emotionally as he had to photograph people while they were making the excruciating decision about donating a loved-one's organs.
"Bill Luster is the most beloved person in all of photography," Abell said. "He had a combination of things: personal charisma, absolute hard work, and belief in the high calling of photography."
He covered 55 Kentucky Derbies, continuing to shoot them even after he retired until just a few years ago when his health and mobility issues made it impossible for him.
But beyond his work as a photographer, he was a consummate prankster.
For decades, he would make up outlandish tales for young reporters, photographers and interns about his previous career as a jockey and the time he had a mount in the Kentucky Derby — tales that were believable because he was a tad under 5 feet.
In reality, Luster wrote that a man in his hometown once convinced him he could be a jockey and urged him to climb into the saddle. 'I promptly fell off.'
Mather recalled that Luster would often send interns to photograph a man who ran a local laundry who had let it be known over and over again that he did not want his picture taken.
At lunch, he'd sometimes pilfer pieces of silverware and drop them into the purses of female coworkers who went along, said Mary Ann Gerth, a former photographer for The Courier Journal who grew up in Luster's hometown of Glasgow, Kentucky, and was photographed by him at a parade when she was a child.
'I found many of the forks and spoons in my purse before we left the restaurant. For the rest, my apologies to the Bristol," she said.
He was also the target of pranks.
Mather said he and Luster for years traded a self-serving book published by a photographer at another newspaper — trying to find inventive ways to slip it to the other person. After that joke grew old, they traded a gaudy plaster of Paris pig.
Mather said he finally got the best of Luster when Pete Souza, the chief photographer for Reagan and Obama, snuck the pig into the White House for Luster to find while he was there photographing Obama.
"He's a very determined photographer ... he pursued excellence, no matter the assignment, whether it's a photo of the president of the United States, the Kentucky Derby, or University of Kentucky basketball, or some community assignment around Louisville," Souza said.
"But he also had a good sense of humor; he liked to play practical jokes, and he liked to tell stories about practical jokes after the fact," Souza said, noting that one of his favorite pranks happened more than 40 years ago "and he was still telling that story this year."
He was a University of Kentucky basketball fan who never forgave Duke star Christian Laettner for hitting the shot in the NCAA's 1992 regional finals knocking UK out of the tournament. In a video at his retirement party, his coworkers included a clip of Laettner speaking directly to Luster, 'Hey, Bill, remember me?'
He was a Democrat.
During the 2024 election, a Donald Trump campaign sign mysteriously appeared in his front yard. His son, Joseph, quickly removed it and put it in the trash.
Retired CJ photographer Pam Spaulding was often the target of his pranks.
He once had the light switches in her house changed so that "up" was off and "down" was on. And he often stole her keys and moved her car in The Courier Journal parking lot so she couldn't find it.
Before she left for an interview for a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University, Luster and Mather snuck into her house and hid a frying pan, a tambourine and a copy of the Yellow Pages in her suitcase.
"When I got to Boston and opened my suitcase, It took me about 30 seconds to figure out Bill did it," Spaulding said. "When I called him, as soon as he heard my voice, he was on the floor laughing. ... But it wasn't just me, everyone in the country has been pranked by Bill Luster."
Charles William Luster was born in 1944 in Glasgow, Kentucky, to Betty and Earl Luster. Earl Luster was a civil engineer and was just starting a long career in the military with posts around the world and around the country when Bill Luster was born.
Betty and Earl Luster soon split up and when Bill Luster was 4 years old, Betty married Joe T. Hall, a local rural free delivery carrier in Glasgow who raised his wife's son as his own.
Bill Luster graduated from Glasgow High School in 1962 and headed off to Western Kentucky State College, where he began dabbling in photography as a hobby.
He returned home to Glasgow in 1964 where he became a photographer and sportswriter for the Glasgow Daily Times. He improved his skills there for five years — occasionally shooting freelance photos for The Courier Journal — before The Courier Journal and Louisville Times hired him in 1969.
He married the former Linda Shearer in a ceremony at Highland Baptist Church in 1976.
Over 42 years at the Courier Journal, Luster would become the most well-known of the newspaper's photographers, winning some of the biggest national awards and leading the National Press Photographers Association as its president for a term.
He had stints as the newspaper's director of photography and was the paper's chief photographer when he retired in 2011.
He was part of the teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes for The Courier Journal.
The first was the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for the newspaper's coverage of court-ordered busing, and the second came in 1989 when the newspaper's news and photo staffs won the award for local reporting for its coverage of the Carroll County bus crash.
The crash — the nation's worst drunken-driving accident — killed 27 adults and children on a church bus returning to Radcliff, Kentucky, following an outing to Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati.
Luster's iconic photo of police investigators peering at the burned-out shell of the bus on the newspaper's front page on May 16, 1988, gave readers a graphic image of the tragedy that happened two nights before.
Luster was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2012.
He is survived by his wife, his son, Joseph, and daughter-in-law, Lauren, and two grandchildren.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [e-mail]. You can also follow him at @jgerth.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Bill Luster, former Courier Journal photographer, dies at 80