Bob Davidoff, 78; Kennedy Clan’s Florida Photographer

Bob Davidoff, the court photographer of the Camelot years for the Kennedy clan in Palm Beach, Fla., has died. He was 78.

Davidoff died Oct. 9 of pneumonia at a hospital in West Palm Beach.

For more than 40 years, he chronicled the Kennedy family on its winter sojourns in Palm Beach, the Florida playground of the rich and well-connected. His images of a youthful John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, looking at ease and effortlessly glamorous, helped gild the image of the Kennedys as America’s royal family.

Davidoff was a society photographer, not a paparazzo, a distinction he considered important. He never allowed publication of unflattering pictures, whether his subjects were political figures, tycoons or movie stars.

For more than 30 years, Davidoff was the house photographer at the Breakers, Palm Beach’s oldest and grandest hotel. More recently, he and his sons, Daryl, Kenneth and Michael, were the official photographers at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

After arriving in Palm Beach in 1955, Davidoff captured the comings and goings of the high-society resort. He photographed Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra, the duke and duchess of Windsor, Bob Hope, Muhammad Ali and Marlon Brando.

But it was his relationship with the Kennedys, which developed from cultivating the trust of matriarch Rose, that made Davidoff more like a family friend than a photographer. He was invited to the Kennedy home on North Ocean Drive to shoot formal portraits and casual scenes of family birthdays and holiday celebrations.

Davidoff captured images of President Kennedy attending church, laughing with his brothers and playfully lifting his children over his head. The photographer took his final pictures of Kennedy four days before the president was assassinated.

Davidoff was especially close to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and continued to shoot pictures of her throughout her life.

“If I took a bad picture of her, I would kill it,” he said. “She trusted me and would not duck me.”

He photographed the Kennedy family through the 1990s, including holding a private portrait session with John F. Kennedy Jr. and his future wife, Carolyn Bessette. Many of the photographer’s images are on display at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.

Davidoff was born in New York and grew up in Brooklyn. He studied photography before enlisting in the Navy during World War II. He was awarded a Silver Star for rescuing a wounded sailor from the waters off Normandy.

In addition to his sons, all of Lake Worth, Fla., he is survived by his wife, Sarah, of Palm Springs, Fla., and three granddaughters.