Vice President Dick Cheney likes to joke that had Marty LaVor not declined an offer in 1969 to be top aide to then-Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) head Donald Rumsfeld-and thereby opened the job to Cheney himself-LaVor rather than Cheney might today be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Without reaching the position of longtime friend Cheney, LaVor has enjoyed a full life and multifaceted career as: public school teacher, administrator for a private training program for the handicapped, regional head of OEO, senior staffer for the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee, and top adviser to the House Select Committee on Hunger.
Upon leaving the congressional payroll, LaVor eschewed life on a pension and turned his hobby into a full-time job. A self-taught photographer, LaVor now photographs the Congress in which he worked, covers society weddings, corporate and association meetings, and national party conventions. He has traveled to 98 countries, is the author of two books and his work has been featured in 35 one-man exhibitions.
LaVor’s third volume is a unique photographic review of the city he knows best-Washington D.C. In a compendium, he shares the legacy of the day Rep. Mike Oxley (R.-Ohio) and his family were late for a shooting at the Supreme Court for their annual Christmas card.
Their favorite photographer began exploring the court building from new angles with a new fisheye lens. What he saw (and eventually recorded on two rolls of film before the Oxleys finally arrived) was an unprecedented portrait-artful, well sculpted, but almost unrecognizable as the home to the highest court in the land.
An intrigued LaVor was then off and, in his words, "discovering, seeing Washington in a totally different way." Aiming his camera upward in more than 120 locations, he presents sites from the chandeliers in the U.S. Capitol to the entrance of the storied Hay-Adams Hotel to the Canadian Embassy from an angle that gives them a breathtaking appearance. LaVor’s panoramic scan of the city where he has worked for more than a generation-presented in color photos in this magnificent new book-offers its most famous and enduring sites as no one as seen them before.
Accompanied by a CD, Looking Up can also be viewed on a computer. But this is no mere coffee-table tome: almost certainly unable to recognize LaVor’s photos of the nation’s capital (as I was), even the most tourist-like reader will want to go back and revisit those monuments to see what LaVor captured through his lens.
