E-Mail This Article to a Friend Pumping Kerry George Butler’s photographs at Gallery Kayafas BY MIKE MILIARD

They don’t call him "Live Shot" for nothing. John Forbes Kerry has never been camera-shy: not when he was sailing Narragansett Bay with the other JFK in 1962, or when he was a boat captain in Vietnam; not as the high-profile spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or as the junior senator from Massachusetts. Photographer and filmmaker George Butler knows this better than anyone. He’s been one of Kerry’s close friends since the mid ’60s, and he’s taken in the neighborhood of 6000 photographs of that rock-hewn face over the past 35 years. Opening just in time for the Democratic National Convention, an exhibit featuring some of his favorites hangs at Gallery Kayafas; it’s up through the end of July.

"I met John in 1964, and we stayed in touch during the time that he was in Vietnam," says Butler, who’s also working on a 90-minute Kerry documentary (the DNC may get a sneak preview) and an accompanying book that should be out by September. He says he intuited from the start that Kerry was destined for great things. "On the spot. The moment I shook hands with him. It was a stature. He was tall, he was Lincoln-esque even in those days. He had a kind of bearing. And I also knew that he’d been elected the youngest chairman of the Yale Political Union and that he was interested in politics. So some of the clues were there. But I thought from the beginning that he would one day run for president. And I’m not exaggerating for a second."

Kerry enlisted Butler as his "sort-of press secretary" during his early campaigns. "My job was to go to the Globe and the Harvard Crimson and the Phoenix. I would handle radio feeds and be a liaison with the press." The photographs he took in those years and subsequently trace Kerry’s inexorable rise from Purple Heart peacenik to presidential aspirant. We see him at anti-war rallies, like the one in Bryant Park in New York City where he crossed paths with another famous John (see below). And more recently, at work in his office and at home with his family.

Butler is best known as a documentarian. His films include The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000) and Pumping Iron (1977), the seminal documentary about bodybuilding culture that introduced the world to a Tyrolian muscleman named Arnold Schwarzenegger. "I spotted Schwarzenegger before anyone else, and also predicted that he would be governor of California. There was a Premiere magazine published in 1988 when Twins came out, and I am prominently displayed in the article predicting Arnold will become governor of California. There were loud hoots of laughter that erupted when that magazine was printed."

Butler was quoted in a recent New Yorker profile of the Gubernator calling the young Schwarzenegger "one of the most ingenuous, naive people I’ve ever met — the greenhorn to end all greenhorns." But he says that Arnold, like Kerry, always had star power. "There was a reason I took 7500 photographs of Arnold and borrowed money and made Pumping Iron. I thought Arnold was going to be a very big star indeed." And though he concedes that Kerry and Schwarzenegger are in most respects very different, Butler says they share one defining trait: "Will. W-I-L-L. Each of them had this ability to go back again and again and again and again when they had been rejected."

Which suggests a fascinating, if improbable, scenario. Suppose that Kerry becomes president and then during his first term the Constitution gets amended to allow foreign-born citizens to run for president (a bill to this extent has already been proposed by Senator Orrin Hatch), thereby thrusting Schwarzenegger — whom Butler calls "probably the brightest light in the Republican Party at the moment" — into the race. What of Kerry versus Schwarzenegger in 2008?

"I’m very amused at that possibility," Butler laughs, before assuring me that his vote would go to Kerry. Still, he says, "it would be an astonishing race, because they’re both so good at what they do."

"John Kerry: A Portrait from 1969 to the Present" runs through July 31, with a reception this Friday, July 9, at 5:30 p.m., at Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Avenue, #223, in the South End; call (617) 482-0411.