Photographer Raymond Corey’s day on October 11, 1965, started with a crackly announcement that came across the police scanner: A robbery was in progress at Brotherhood State Bank.
The bank was only half a block from the Kansas City Kansan newspaper offices, so Corey grabbed his camera and ran out the door to capture the scene on film.
Friend and longtime Kansas City news photographer Roy Inman still remembers the dramatic photograph Corey captured.
“The police have the bank robber on the ground,” Inman recalled. “He's flat on his face, the money is in the foreground, and you've got a cop on the left and a cop on the right, and they have him handcuffed.”
The newspaper wire service United Press International picked up the photo and the image was reproduced around the country. The photograph was so perfect, Inman said, readers called in the next day thinking it had been staged.
“Steven Spielberg could not pose it any better for a film, and here Ray just got right down there,” Inman said. “He's like six inches from the guy's gun, the cops are like a foot or two away, and they've got handcuffs.”
The photo of the failed robbery helped launch Corey’s 15-year career, and a black and white print of it is included in a new photography exhibit that opened last month at the State Historical Society of Missouri at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, called “Through the Lens: Photographs of Raymond Corey.”
As a staff photographer for the Kansas City Kansan and the Kansas City Star from 1965 to 1980, Corey photographed Midwestern events large and small.
He photographed National Guardsmen on the streets of Kansas City in the aftermath of unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and was there to capture the wave of antiwar protests at a 1970 “Teach-In” at UMKC. Corey was in the crowd at Kemper Arena when the 1976 Republican National Convention nominated Gerald Ford for president and U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, from Kansas, for vice president.
Corey also took pictures of quiet, behind-the-scenes moments: an exhausted competitor snoozing between two cows at the American Royal, and a dancer leaping on the lawn of Starlight Theatre.
His daughter Lee Wadsworth said she remembers her father often grabbing his camera bag before hustling off to assignments when she was growing up.
“It was not an eight to five job, and it was not a Monday through Friday job,” Wadsworth said. “Any time there was any kind of major gathering, whether it was for a convention or the opening of the airport, that's what he did.”
After Corey’s death in 1995 at age 59, Wadsworth and her three siblings wanted to make sure her father’s legacy and the history he captured was preserved, so she reached out to the State Historical Society of Missouri to see if they might be interested in his archive.
“He had all these boxes of negatives and we needed to do something with them,” Wadsworth said. “We've been really, really blessed that they have this home, and they know what to do with them.”
The Corey family donated almost 50,000 negatives from his time working for newspapers.
Whitney Heinzmann, coordinator of the historical society’s research center, said they were excited to add them to the collection.
Until recently, Corey’s photographs were not readily accessible to the general public, but Heinzmann commissioned earlier this year the digitization of 8,000 negatives from the Raymond E. Corey photo collection. The high-resolution, archival quality images are now online for researchers.
“It was a large undertaking,” Heinzmann said. “We got the materials digitized, and then staff came through and added metadata so it could go up on the website.”
Heinzmann said that she hopes the new exhibit will help get the word out about the permanent collection. Staff created four floor-to-ceiling banners at the research center to promote the exhibit, showcasing 50 of Corey’s photographs.
“It was very difficult to choose,” Heinzmann said. “There are some great images, and he covered such a wide area of topics and geographic locations in the Kansas City region.”
The exhibit also includes artifacts from Corey’s long career, including a congratulatory letter from the National Press Photographer’s Association announcing a national award for his photograph of the failed bank robbery, several black and white prints and a press pass from a Midwestern Governor’s Conference held in 1969.
“I know this is just a tiny bit of what's in the collection,” Wadsworth said. “Hopefully this will encourage others to get into it.”
“Through the Lens: Photographs of Raymond Corey” runs through Dec. 19, 2025, at the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Kansas City Research Center in Miller Nichols Library, 800 E. 51st St., Room 306, Kansas City, Missouri 64110. For more information, go to SHSMO.org.
