Bernie Boston

Boston died at his home in Basye, Virginia, on January 22, 2008, of amyloidosis.

He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for a 1987 photograph of Coretta Scott King unveiling a bust of her late husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in the U.S. Capitol.

Boston covered every president from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton. In 1967 he was commissioned to shoot a portrait of former Black Panther H. Rap Brown. Noticing the trend of a call for civil rights in the late 1960s, Boston took more images of the Civil Rights Movement, including a portrait of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during his Poor People's Campaign, and other notable events. On October 22, 1967 he photographed his most famous picture, Flower Power, which showed a Vietnam War protester inserting flowers into National Guardsmen's rifle barrels.

In 1958, he left the Army and returned to Washington, working in custom photofinishing. He started his news photography career in Dayton, Ohio with the Dayton Daily News. He moved back to Washington to work at The Washington Star and was director of photography when the newspaper folded in 1981. He then was hired by the Los Angeles Times to establish a photo operation in the nation's capital.

Boston was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in McLean, Virginia. During his time in high school he was a photographer for the newspaper and yearbook. He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 1955. He was a member of the Gamma Phi local fraternity and RIT, and after it became a chapter of Sigma Pi fraternity he was inducted into the national organization. After his time at RIT, Boston studied at the School of Aviation Medicine in the U.S. Air Force. He served in the Army for two years while in Germany practicing radiology "in a neurosurgical unit."

Bernie Boston (May 18, 1933 – January 22, 2008) was an American photographer most noted for his iconic Flower Power image.