Ken Regan | Trusted photographer

Ken Regan, a photojournalist whose reputation for discretion earned him a backstage pass to the private realms of rock stars and other celebrities, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, died last Sunday in Manhattan.

The cause was cancer, his daughter Suzanne Regan said.

Mr. Regan was the official photographer for the Rolling Stones on several tours in the 1970s and Kennedy's unofficial personal photographer in the last four decades of his life.

He was also the official photographer for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, and the Live Aid concert in 1985.

Mr. Regan was the favorite photographer of people who were famous for being wary of photographers. Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, and Oprah Winfrey were frequent subjects. When People magazine sought homey shots of Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, or Robert Redford in their mountain aeries, Mr. Regan was often asked to take the job.

Mr. Regan maintained strict personal boundaries of his own. Only family members knew his age. Only his two daughters knew his cellphone number. And when he was told he had cancer several years ago, he kept the news to himself, sharing it only in the final weeks of his life with a small circle of intimates.

"Privacy was a principle he took very seriously," said Suzanne Guard, a longtime friend.

He credited his relationships with making possible some of his finest pictures: Keith Richards holding his infant daughter Theodora in 1985, looking more like the tired father of a newborn than the debauched all-night reveler he often was; Allen Ginsberg and Dylan sitting cross-legged at Jack Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Mass., in 1975; a 1974 photo of Kennedy and his son Ted Jr. walking down a hallway together, the youth using a cane just months after the amputation of his cancerous right leg, the father supporting him. - N.Y. Times News Service