The Max G. Lowenherz collection of Kennedy family photographs was created by photographer Orlando Suero. From late 1953 to early 1955, Suero was a staff photographer for Three Lions Picture Agency, Inc., a New York–based agency that specialized mainly in photographing great works of art for calendars and greeting cards. In 1954, at one of the regular staff meetings, Suero suggested to Max G. Lowenherz, the owner of Three Lions, that he do a photo essay on a young U.S. senator and his wife: John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. Lowenherz was reluctant. It was shortly after the Kennedys were married and he was convinced that the press had already saturated the public with photos of the couple. Suero, however, was convinced that he could produce a series of unique, beautiful, and marketable photographs of the Kennedys. Lowenherz allowed the photographer to contact the senator.

John F. Kennedy was at the beginning of his political career and eager for national exposure, so he welcomed the idea of a photo essay and promised his full cooperation. Thus, in May 1954, Orlando Suero came to Washington, D.C., and spent several days with Senator and Mrs. Kennedy, photographing them on more than twenty occasions. Suero was given almost unlimited access to the Kennedys' personal lives, photographing them at small dinners with their friends and relatives, alone together in the backyard of their Georgetown home on Sunday morning, and playing in the park with Robert and Ethel Kennedy, who lived nearby.

Originally only a handful of papers and magazines ran a few photographs from the shoot in their Sunday social sections. Lowenherz's original reservations had proved correct: the press was not, at the moment, interested in the young senator and his wife. The photographs were set aside until the time of Kennedy's election to the presidency in 1960. Again the photographs were offered to the press, but they were turned down for more recent, more significant photos. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Lowenherz tried a third time to sell some of the photos. This time, they were overlooked in favor of the now famous "White House" photos by Jacques Lowe. An attempt by Lowenherz in 1975 to sell the collection at auction at Sotheby's resulted in the unauthorized reproduction by UPI of some of the photos, which were then reproduced in several European magazines. Still, a 1989 examination of over 40 books on the Kennedys revealed not one single reproduction of a Suero/Three Lions photograph.

After the dissolution of Three Lions, the Kennedy photographs remained the possession of Mr. Lowenherz, who gave them to the Peabody Institute in August 1989. Peabody held a gala exhibition of a selection of 50 prints in May 1990, the first time many of these images had ever been seen by the public. In 2001, Johns Hopkins University Press published Camelot at Dawn, a book featuring selected images from Suero’s photographs and text by Peabody Institute public relations director Anne Garside.