Camera of Record : Gene Barnes was present at the creation of TV news. His documentary stills are having their first exhibit.

SHERMAN OAKS —  When Gene Barnes went to work for NBC News in Los Angeles as an apprentice cameraman in 1952, he probably gave little thought to the fact that he was joining an enterprise that would contribute to changing the way most Americans receive their news.

Not everyone had a television set then. Many people still saw filmed news stories only in movie theaters, where newsreels were shown before the feature. But theatrical newsreels were dying as television brought news into our living rooms and made household names of broadcast journalists such as John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Barnes’ first job at NBC was with Swayze on the “Camel News Caravan.” He also shot the first pictures of Huntley that were shown on television, when Huntley was working in Los Angeles. Soon after, NBC moved Huntley to New York.

Between 1952 and 1965, Barnes was assigned to shoot film stories of everything from hard news and politics to science, art and entertainment. He always took two cameras with him--a motion picture camera for NBC News, and a still camera for his personal edification.

His stills have never been exhibited, until now. The Orlando Gallery is presenting 86 of his compelling 16-by-20-inch black-and-white prints in the show, “I, Witness, Documentary Portraits of the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

A picture of Nikita Khrushchev during his 1959 visit to Los Angeles shares gallery space with a pensive Maurice Chevalier near the end of his life; Nehru, prime minister of India, on a tour of Disneyland, and Walter Winchell at work. Winchell sits at a typewriter before a row of photographs of strippers, part of the Los Angeles’ Federal Building’s press room scenery.

Barnes captured the likes of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, as well as the Atlas missile launch in 1955 and an atom bomb explosion in 1957. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Watts Towers creator Simon Rodia and Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller also came before his cameras.

“This is a very important and impressive collection of photography,” said gallery director Bob Gino. “It’s a documentation of a time and an era that is very significant to our world in all aspects, especially about California. There is so much about California here.”

Barnes learned to take pictures in the Navy during World War II. “You had to shoot everything--stills, motion pictures, aerial photography, whatever photography had to be done on board a carrier or a base,” said Barnes, 67, a Studio City resident. “And you had to be able to process it whether it was motion pictures or a still, color or black and white.”

As an apprentice cameraman in the early ‘50s, Barnes “had the pleasure” of working with many of the theatrical newsreel cameramen, he said. “They taught me so much.”

A number of the images in the show are of people behind the camera. Barnes said they are “the hardest subjects in the world to photograph. And they were not just a challenge, they were friends, and I wanted to see if I could capture the essence of the people who show everybody else what’s happening.”

In 1957, Barnes altered the nature of film coverage of news events when he took his 16-millimeter sound camera off its tripod and put it on his shoulder to grab an exclusive interview with killer Steve Nash in Los Angeles. Nash had been convicted and sentenced to death, and was on his way to San Quentin’s Death Row.

“He’d killed 11 people. He was scary. I could only cover the man silent, and yet his vocabulary, the stories and things he would tell, were so gruesome. I thought the public has to hear this man as well. They wouldn’t let us in the jail anywhere with a sound camera,” Barnes said.

Still pictures of Nash, as well as statements he made on his way to Death Row, are included in the exhibit.

Where and When What: “I, Witness, Documentary Portraits of the ‘50s and ‘60s.” Location: Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Ends Feb. 26. Call: (818) 789-6012.