Los Angeles (CNN) -- Thousands of photos taken during John F. Kennedy's 1,036 days as president remain unseen since White House photographer Cecil Stoughton printed and logged them in his darkroom five decades ago.
When Stoughton's family auctioned them last month, collector and filmmaker Keya Morgan purchased about 15,000 of the images, including many showing private Kennedy family moments.
"He was there all the time, and he trusted him with his life," Morgan said of Stoughton.
Most captured public events, but usually just a few shots from an event would have been released, Morgan said. The boxes likely hold surprises, but it could take years for him to examine each image, he said.
"I would say 95% of these photos have never been published or seen by anyone, and that is because there are just way too many," Morgan said.
Morgan gave CNN the first peek inside the boxes after the photographs were delivered to him in Los Angeles this week.
Reaching into a box and pulling out a stack of photos is like traveling through time, he said.
He pulled out a stack of 5-by-5 black-and-white photos, some stuck together by the years. They appeared to be in the same sequence in which Stoughton developed them in his White House darkroom.
This first stack showed Caroline Kennedy's fifth birthday party, her last with her father. President Kennedy was assassinated five days before her sixth.
Another batch revealed a 2-year-old John Kennedy Jr. -- known then as John-John -- reaching into his parakeet's cage while his mother held him.
It was the younger John Kennedy who first stirred Morgan's interest in Stoughton's photo archives in 1997. Kennedy was his friend and a client of his New York gallery, he said.
"He called me one night and said 'I need this photo, you know, the photo of me under the desk, but not the famous one,'" Morgan said.
The "famous one" of a young Kennedy under the Oval Office desk while his father worked above him was taken by photographer Stanley Tretick for LOOK magazine in October 1963.
But Kennedy wanted a photo taken a year earlier by Stoughton, he said.
Morgan found a surprise this weekend preparing for an interview with CNN's Don Lemon. It was an unknown photo of Caroline playing with another girl in the same spot under her father's desk. Morgan did not immediately know if the other girl was a Kennedy cousin or a friend.
Kennedy cousins may recognize themselves in photos they had long forgotten or have never seen.
"It's impossible for anyone to have seen these because Cecil was so secretive," Morgan said. "He was so protective and he had all these items locked up."
Morgan bought several hundred photos from Stoughton in the last years of his life, including the one that is apparently the only existing photo of Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe.
"Cecil was with President Kennedy basically all the time and even in some fairly intimate moments," Morgan said. "It is shocking at the incredible volume of photos that he took, including some that are highly sensitive and private."
Since Morgan is busy writing a book and producing a documentary about Monroe's mysterious death, combing through his newly-acquired Kennedy collection will be slow, he said.
He will start posting the first of the Kennedy images on his website LincolnImages.com for licensing, he said.
Morgan also claims the largest collection of Lincoln photos, but the numbers are minuscule compared to Kennedy's. Only 129 unique images of Lincoln are known to exist, he said.
