Speaker: Joyce Boghosian

Award-winning photographer Harry Naltchayan (1925–1994) was born in Beirut, Lebanon. As a teenager, he sold his photographs to local newspapers and later freelanced for Time, Newsweek, and several European magazines. Naltchayan came to the United States in 1958 as a refugee during the Lebanese Civil War and almost immediately began working for The Washington Post. During the 35 years he was with the newspaper, Naltchayan covered nine U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton. 

His daughter, Joyce Naltchayan Boghosian, continued his legacy by photographing six U.S. presidents. Boghosian has worked on both sides of the velvet rope as an official White House photographer as well as a member of the White House Press Corps for Agence France-Presse (AFP), an international wire service. She will share stories going back to her father's early days photographing historic events in Lebanon and the Middle East and his experiences at The Washington Post that inspired her own photographic journey through the White House spanning more than two decades from 1988 to 2021.

Boghosian recalls first using her father’s Leica, a high-end German camera, when she went on a field trip in the fifth grade. In their youth, she and her brothers, also photographers, tagged along with their father on occasional assignments when photographing celebrities or special events. As the high school yearbook photographer, she was front and center with the press to capture President Ronald Reagan’s visit, where he addressed the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. This moment catapulted her desire to pursue a career in photography.

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