American photographer (born 1960)
Doug Mills (born 1960) is an American photographer who has covered the White House since 1983.[1] He began working for The New York Times in 2002, having previously been the chief photographer for The Associated Press in Washington, in which capacity he won two Pulitzer prizes for team coverage. As of February 2019, he is a board member of the White House Correspondents' Association.[2][3][4]
Early life
Mills was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960. He studied at Northern Virginia Community College.[5]
Career
Mills worked in the Washington, D.C. office of United Press International, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.[5] Previously, he worked at a newspaper in Virginia.[6] In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for photography for covering the Bill Clinton 1992 presidential campaign. He won a second Pulitzer Prize for AP's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.[5] It has been reported that Mills was the first photographer—in 2001—to use a remote camera to photograph presidents.[6]
Mills won multiple awards at the "2021 Eyes of History Still Contest" of The White House News Photographers Association. His awards included Photographer of the Year and Political Photo of the Year (for a photo of then U.S. President Donald J. Trump leaving Air Force One during a lightning storm).[7] Trump called Mills the "No. 1 photographer in the world."[6] Of the seven U.S. presidents Mills covered, he considered Barack Obama the most "photogenic" and Trump the most "iconic."[6]
In 2022, Mills covered his 16th Olympic Games.[8]
All of a sudden, there was what I thought were three or four loud pops. At first I thought it was a car. The last thing I thought was it was a gun.
I kept taking pictures. He went down behind the lectern, and I thought, "Oh my God, something's happened."
I've never been in a more horrific scene. As much as I've covered presidents for 35 to 40 years, it's not something I ever wanted to witness.
— Doug Mills, 'A Times Photographer Who Was Feet Away From Trump Describes the Shooting', The New York Times, the 14th of July, 2024
On the 13th of July, 2024, Mills took a world-famous[9][10][11][12][13][14] photograph during the assassination attempt[15] of the 45th President of the USA, Donald J. Trump, capturing one of the bullets whizzing millimetres away from his head. The New York Times article's expert considered the photo as 'a one in a million shot and nearly impossible to catch even if one knew the bullet was coming'.[16]
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