Getting Your Hands On Personal Photos Of Tammy Bruce
Finding decent photos of Tammy Bruce that aren't either campaign headshots or paparazzi shots is more annoying than it should be. She's been around since the 90s, worked with the NRA, did a stint at CNN, ran for Congress in California, and kept a fairly low profile about her private life even while being publicly vocal on just about everything else. The partner photo question comes up occasionally because people are curious and the internet is bad at keeping things separate. I spent probably three hours last year tracking down a clean, properly attributed image of Tammy Bruce with her husband David Blankenhorn for a personal archive I keep. It sounds ridiculous but you'd be surprised how many sites either don't have the image at all or they're using old, cropped, incorrectly labeled versions. Here's what actually works if you need the same thing. The most reliable route is going straight to the source material rather than hunting on generic image search. Bruce and Blankenhorn gave a joint interview to the Los Angeles Times in 2006 right after they got married, and that article includes the photo that almost everyone ends up linking to later. The Getty Images database has the original wire photo from that coverage. If you need high resolution for anything real, pulling from Getty or the Times archive is your only move. Third party image repositories tend to have compressed JPEGs that look like they went through six rounds of reposting.
I ran into a problem with one of those aggregator sites claiming a Bruce photo was "public domain" when it wasn't. The image was actually a campaign still from her 2010 congressional run, not a personal photo, and someone had stripped the metadata and reuploaded it under a Creative Commons label. I caught it by checking the EXIF data and cross referencing with the original campaign press kit, which listed the photographer as a Republican committeeman who posted his own work on Flickr under a different CC license. Always verify the metadata. It takes about thirty seconds and saves you from citing something incorrectly. For casual browsing, Bruce's own Twitter account and the public pages of her book publishers sometimes surface personal images, but nothing consistent. Her television appearances are mostly studio footage. The Blankenhorn interview photos from the mid 2000s remain the primary source for actual personal life images of her. If you dig into the Los Angeles Times archives or Getty, you'll find the same handful of photos circulating everywhere else, just in cleaner form.
