Jerry Gay

Jerry Gay died peacefully in his sleep on the morning of 14 October 2026, aged 79 and weeks from his 80th birthday. His daughter Ellen Bohn announced his death on behalf of the family, describing him as a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, an adored father and grandfather and a dear friend to many, and said details of a celebration of life would follow.

A few years before his death he slipped during an ice storm on his way to the Everett food bank where he volunteered and developed a hematoma. His son said he declined afterwards, developed dementia and had recently lost the ability to speak, though he still smiled when family told him stories from his career. No specific cause of death was made public.

Tributes were published by Robinson Newspapers on 16 October and by The Seattle Times on 21 October 2026, with former colleagues including Alan Berner, Cole Porter, Dan Lamont, Patrick and Ken Robinson and Eric Mathison recalling his talent and kindness.

Jerry Gay, born Gerald H. Gay, grew up in Lynnwood in south Snohomish County, Washington, during the 1950s and 1960s. He began taking pictures when he was about 11 and developed his own photographs in the family basement. As a boy he delivered The Daily Herald of Everett, and he reported for his high school newspaper.

In the eighth grade at Lynnwood Junior High a teacher, Mr. Mudge, noticed that every book report he turned in was about photographers, and arranged for him to use the school's vacated darkroom in place of a class. In the ninth grade he photographed school life and mounted shows in the hallway display cases. On the teacher's recommendation he was allowed to become a yearbook photographer at Edmonds High School as a sophomore, and he spent three years on the yearbook before graduating in 1964 with the dream of becoming a professional photographer.

He went on to the Brooks Institute of Photography in California, which friends described as the best photography school in the world, but left without graduating to begin work as a photojournalist.

Gay worked for newspapers in the Seattle area, where as a young photographer he slept with a police scanner beside him and raced to fires and other breaking news at any hour. The Seattle Times was his third newspaper job, and he joined the paper in 1972.

On 11 October 1974 picture editor Jim Heckman sent him to check on an overnight house fire at Three Tree Point in Burien, though it was probably already out. Gay found four exhausted volunteer firefighters, Joe Guild, Tom Gudmestad, Chris Kitterman and Jim Flick, resting together on a smoky, muddy hillside. He made a few frames and returned to the paper, where the picture ran as "Lull in the Battle". It won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, and he is the only photographer in the history of The Seattle Times to receive the prize. He was standing at the roadside on another breaking news call when he learned he had won.

His prints were known for their dramatic contrast. To make them survive the paper's poor reproduction he bleached detail into the dark areas with potassium ferrocyanide and banished the middle greys. He was named regional photographer of the year four years running, was runner-up for national newspaper photographer of the year and was elected national president of the National Press Photographers Association. In 1977 he spent hours photographing Ted Bundy in a Colorado jail, including a picture taken from below a table that showed Bundy's ankles in chains.

The Pulitzer opened doors, and Gay moved on often, working at the Los Angeles Times, The Maui News, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and several other papers, with stints in Everett, Seattle and New York. He shared a studio and darkroom in Seattle with the photographer Dan Lamont, produced a regional monthly called Picture Magazine for about two years, and worked as a radio DJ in Blaine in Whatcom County. In August 2004 he gave a professional development presentation to Navy photographers and journalists at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

Using a start-up fee from stock photography work, he spent three consecutive summers driving more than 50,000 miles of back roads across the lower 48 states, photographing people and scenes for a project he called Washington State to Washington, D.C.: Searching for the Heart of America. The work became his self-published book "Seeing Reality: Humanity, Humility and Humor" (2010), with a foreword by the author Robert Fulghum, and he also produced a small book of photographs of children in Roslyn called "Our Road to Peace". In his later career he freelanced for Robinson Newspapers, publishers of the West Seattle Herald, White Center News, Highline Times, Ballard News-Tribune and Des Moines News, taking front-page pictures and feature portraits of local residents into the 2010s. He never moved to digital cameras and kept working in the darkroom.

Gay told The Seattle Times in 2018 that he had been married three times and had come through bankruptcy, experiences he said had prepared him not to judge others. He never stayed at one paper long enough to earn a pension, and in retirement he lived very simply in Everett, where he was a full-time caregiver to a 90-year-old and volunteered at a food bank.

His daughter Ellen Bohn and son Eric McGinnis said they saw little of him in their early years while he travelled for work, but reconnected with him as adults after he settled in La Conner in the late 1980s. He took his grandchildren on photography walks, hosted pizza parties and was known for his rich, dense brownies. Friends' children called him "crazy uncle Jerry". He kept a Razr flip phone long after smartphones arrived, saying life was changing too fast.

"Lull in the Battle" is remembered as a picture that turned a routine fire call into a study of human exhaustion, and it remains The Seattle Times' only Pulitzer Prize in photography. Colleagues credited Gay with teaching younger photographers to break away from the pack, look for the small moments at the edges of a story and respect the humanity of their subjects. Robinson Newspapers wrote that he taught them a camera is not a tool for taking something from a subject but a bridge for sharing understanding, dignity and warmth. His family holds several tote bags of his slides, negatives and publications, which his daughter hopes to archive and digitise.