Ken Feil, a Washington Post photographer who captured decades of the region’s civic life and took a memorably intense image of Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they helped unravel the Watergate scandal, died May 16 at a hospital in Mendoza, Argentina. He was 84.
The cause was heart and lung ailments, said his nephew, Fabian Dib.
Photography was a surreptitious career for Mr. Feil, who initially aspired to follow in the adventure-embracing journalism and literary tradition of Ernest Hemingway, Ernie Pyle and Robert Ruark.
Mr. Feil left Penn State in his third year when his father died and money ran out, and he scraped by in low-level newspaper work in his native Pennsylvania before moving close to a relative in Washington and joining The Post in 1961.
As he wrote in a biographical sketch, he was initially hired as a “lowly copyboy” and once tried to impress an editor on the city desk with his writing talent, only to be told he might aspire one day, after a decade of industrious effort, to be “moderately mediocre.”
Discouraged at his career prospects, Mr. Feil recounted that he “talked (lied) my way into the photography department and stumbled into something I was surprisingly good at.” Following a probationary period mixing chemicals and winning modest assignments, he was elevated to staff photographer.
Retired Post photographer Gerald Martineau said Mr. Feil was regarded among peers as a versatile and reliable photographer. In addition to workaday assignments on Embassy Row and Capitol Hill, Mr. Feil shot images of visiting entertainers and other dignitaries and helped chronicle urban and suburban development.
He was one of the first photographers on the streets covering the 1968 D.C. riots following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also was early on the scene at the Watergate office complex in June 1972, hours after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters — a story that, as details emerged, led two years later to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.
Woodward described Mr. Feil as “one of the great photographers who always, repeat, always was there with his camera.”
From 1982 until he left The Post in 1988, Mr. Feil had the title picture editor and handled hands-on daily management of the photo desk.
Kenneth Bruce Feil was born in Jersey Shore, Pa., on Feb. 14, 1940. His mother was a registered nurse, and his father was an architect.
He had a range of interests outside of photography, including piloting small aircraft and driving BMW motorcycles.
In retirement, he bought a motor yacht and sailed to Florida. He spent many years in the Keys, where he was a freelance photographer, briefly co-owned a bar and, with his second wife, ran a small shop in Islamorada selling handmade goods from Central America. He lived in Marathon, Fla., before moving to Mendoza in 2005.
His first marriage, to Carol Johnson, ended in divorce. In 1998, he married Maria Josefina Mdalel. In addition to his wife, survivors include two brothers.
Mr. Feil had a spirit of restlessness and wanderlust that meshed well with his long career as a Post photographer.
“The wonderfulness of the job,” Mr. Feil wrote, “was that you never knew what you would be doing when you went to work every day — besides the usual crime, plane crashes, culture, sports, interviews, portraits. … You had a part in recording the history of your times.”
