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President Barack Obama at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, October 14, 2016. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.<\/em><\/p>\n- \n
- Alum Pete Souza was Barack Obama\u2019s chief White House photographer<\/b><\/li>\n
- New photo\u00a0book has moments from historic drama to family intimacy\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n
- Souza\u2019s Instagram followers find the photos an antidote to the current administration<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\nA<\/span>man and his daughter dance joyously to the music of Prince, playing just feet away. The president and top national security officials watch in suspense as Navy SEALs raid Osama bin Laden\u2019s secret compound halfway around the world. A tall, very famous man bends deeply to forge a bond with a small boy.<\/p>\n
Pete Souza<\/a>\u00a0(COM\u201976) started taking pictures of Barack Obama in 2005, when he was a\u00a0Chicago Tribune<\/em>\u00a0photographer based in Washington, D.C., and Obama was a freshly minted senator from Illinois. The connection they made landed Souza the job as Obama\u2019s chief official White House photographer, from the first day of his presidency to the last, eight years later. And Obama granted him a stunning level of access, from the biggest moments to the smallest.<\/p>\n
\n![\"banner_GettyImages-102299887\"](\"\/federal\/files\/2017\/11\/banner_GettyImages-102299887.jpg\")
White House photographer Pete Souza (right), camera ready, with President Obama during an event celebrating the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Photo by Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\nSouza had been a White House photographer for President Ronald Reagan, an assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University, and a freelancer for\u00a0National Geographic<\/em>, but photographing the first African American president was the job of a lifetime.<\/p>\n
His new coffee-table book,\u00a0Obama: An Intimate Portrait<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>(Little, Brown, 2017), features eight years of pictures plus an introduction\u2014and a photo of Souza\u2014by Obama.\u00a0<\/em>\u201cSouza\u2019s photographs touchingly reveal Obama\u2019s reticence and self-doubt,\u201d the\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/em>wrote in its review. And from the\u00a0Chicago Tribune:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cIn conveying both the weight of the office and President Obama\u2019s full engagement with its demands, Souza fuels our admiration\u2014and stokes our regret.\u201d And in Souza\u2019s Instagram feed, his 1.6 million followers have found an antidote to news about the current occupant of the White House.<\/p>\n
The College of Communication will honor Souza with the Hugo Shong Lifetime Achievement in Communication Award on February 2, and Souza will give a master class open to the BU community. \u201cThe collection of photographs Pete Souza has assembled is the most powerful window into the Obama White House and the Obama family,\u201d says Thomas Fiedler (COM\u201971), dean of COM.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow, Saturday, November 18, Souza will be in Cambridge for a sold-out discussion and book signing at the Harvard Science Center, sponsored by the Harvard Book Store. Now a freelancer, he talked with\u00a0BU Today\u00a0<\/em>about his pictures and his time with the president.<\/p>\n
BU Today<\/em><\/strong>: How did you get such extraordinary access to President Obama?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Souza:<\/strong>\u00a0I spent a lot of time with him in his first year in the Senate, in 2005, and went on a couple of trips with him. When you\u2019re in that close proximity to someone, you get to know them, especially when you\u2019re in their private zone, their personal space. I think he liked the way I worked\u2014very quietly. I didn\u2019t interrupt what he was doing. And he could see I took my work seriously and I was after authentic photographs. Having that relationship coming into the White House was crucial.<\/p>\n
\n![\"obamas_P022209PS-0492-1\"](\"\/federal\/files\/2017\/11\/obamas_P022209PS-0492-1.jpg\")
The president and First Lady at a White House dinner for US governors. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\nBut there must have been times when you were ordered out of the room?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Not really. One of the things about being a seasoned photographer is that I\u2019ve been down this road before, dealt with a lot of people in a lot of situations. I think I had a good intuition about if I needed to leave the room and when I needed to leave the room. My goal was to never have him have to say that to me. If he was having a one-on-one that was literally just him and another person, I knew I needed to get the pictures and then back quietly out of the room, mostly so his guest would not be intimidated that there was someone lurking. But I would make sure that I got the pictures I needed first.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk about a couple of your best-known images. Start with the\u00a0Situation Room<\/em>, showing Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others watching via video feed as Navy SEALS raided Osama bin Laden\u2019s secret compound on May 1, 2011.<\/strong><\/p>\n
This is an important\u00a0moment<\/a>\u00a0in our nation\u2019s history. Here you had all the most powerful men and women of our government in the same room at the same time, and they were helpless in what they were doing. They were monitoring the raid as it happened, but they had made their decision days before and there\u2019s nothing they can do except watch it play out. I think that\u2019s what leads to the anxiety you see in all those faces. And I think the picture gave people\u2014it put them in the room, right? I think that\u2019s why it garnered so much interest. People look at pictures different ways. Yet on this picture people had pretty similar reactions. Except some people wanted to know why Hillary had her hand up to her face. I don\u2019t know why that became an issue, but it did.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nThe First Dad with Malia and Sasha outside the Oval Office. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
At the other end of the spectrum is the May 2009 photo of Obama bending down so a young African American visitor can touch his head, known as\u00a0Hair Like Mine.<\/em>\u00a0It must have gotten some powerful reactions.<\/strong><\/p>\n
It\u2019s two things. One, it tells you a lot about the president. Yeah, he took the job seriously, but he would also bend over to let some little kid rub his head. It also tells you something about that little boy. A four-year-old African American kid looking up at the president of the United States, who looks like him, who\u2019s the same color he is. I think a lot of people identified with it because of that.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve got this African American kid who lives two doors down from me. When I was putting the book together, just sort of as a tease I posted a group of photos on Instagram and asked people to vote on which one should be on the back cover. And the next day I was walking out to my car, and the kid came running up to me. \u2018Sir! Sir! My mom and I saw your post and we voted!\u2019 And I said, \u2018Which one did you vote for?\u2019 And all he did was put his hand on his head, and I almost broke down right there, because it touched me so much.<\/p>\n
Leaving the Oval Office must have been a double whammy for you emotionally\u2014leaving the job and the president on one hand, and seeing Trump taking the country in a very different direction on the other.<\/strong><\/p>\n
Number two was the punch. When you have put in the kind of time and emotional energy I did over eight years\u2014I was ready to leave. That wasn\u2019t a down thing for me. It was time. I don\u2019t miss going to the White House every day. It was a great privilege, but it was also a grind. But what\u2019s happening to the country\u2014and this is more as a citizen than as the White House photographer\u2014that is upsetting to me.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve been tweaking Trump with Instagram images of Obama that highlight the differences between them. But you let your pictures do the talking.<\/strong><\/p>\n
It just kind of innocently started late on January 20 when I posted a photo of President Obama after we left Trump\u2019s swearing in. We\u2019re in the helicopter flying to Andrews Air Force Base, but the pilot flew by the White House, and I got a picture of him looking out the window at it, and I posted it on the first day of my private Instagram account, and I think my caption was just \u201cFarewell.\u201d And the response to it was sort of overwhelming, which was a surprise to me. It got thousands, maybe tens of thousands of comments. I started to realize people still wanted to see pictures of him. So I continued to do that, trying to be subtle in the words I used to accompany the photographs. Certainly I was more respectful in what I said about them on Instagram than what some people wrote on Twitter. I\u2019ll kind of leave it at that.<\/p>\n
Pete Souza will discuss and sign copies of\u00a0<\/em>Obama: An Intimate Portrait\u00a0on Saturday, November 18, at 2 p.m., at the Harvard Science Center, One Oxford St., Cambridge. The event is sold out, but there is a\u00a0waiting list<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n
- New photo\u00a0book has moments from historic drama to family intimacy\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n