The Obama years
on the 10th anniversary of the election of america’s first black president, Nigel Atherton looks back at the work of Barack obama’s official photographer Pete Souza
Pete Souza was President Barack Obama’s official photographer and as such had unique access
There has been an Official White House photographer ever since President John F Kennedy, documenting the Presidency for posterity. When Barack Obama was elected as USA’s first black President on 4 November 2008, Pete Souza already knew him well – as a photographer on the Chicago Tribune he has covered the election of the Chicago lawyer to the Senate in 2004 and had been photographing him for four years as a senator. Inevitably he was Obama’s natural choice for the job, but what exactly did this entail? ‘Here is the Cliffs Notes version of my job,’ explains Pete. ‘I would show up in the morning, and I would tag along with him all day until he went home at night. There were times where it was like watching paint dry. There was not a lot going on. However, if you want to capture those slice-of-life moments you have to always be there, and so I was very committed to being there every day.
‘My goal was to create the best-ever photographic archive that had ever been done of a President. Fortunately we had already established this professional relationship: he knew how I worked and was comfortable with me being around him. He allowed me access to essentially everything. I even went on every vacation he ever had as President, because even when he was on vacation, he was still President of the United States.’
Souza’s discreet lens captured the highs and lows of the Obama Presidency. Every single one of his nearly two million images is saved in perpetuity at the National Archives. His book Obama: An Intimate Portrait contains 300 of those images, including that iconic image taken during the controversial bin Laden mission, consoling the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook school
massacre, and meeting everyone from royalty and heads of state to injured veterans and schoolchildren. Then, of course, there are those moments with his close-knit family, where we see his daughters grow from children to young adults.
Obama’s warm charisma, his sense of kindness and decency, and his air of calm thoughtfulness in the face of the most taxing problems and onerous decisions, stand in stark contrast to the White House of today. Would Souza have wanted to stay on as President Trump’s photographer if he had been asked?
‘I would have said no, but I would have said no to Hillary too, because I was worn out. This job really takes its toll on you both physically and mentally, and it was time for somebody else to do it.’