The title "White House photographer" is somewhat innocuous, but make no mistake: the holder's directive is to capture history. They are tasked with following the president wherever he permits them, clicking away as he bends the trajectory of world events. The range and scope of the job, and the access, depends on who's president—and how much they trust their choice of documentarian. In the case of Pete Souza and his subject, President Barack Obama, that trust was deep and abiding.
Souza accompanied the 44th president across nearly 1.5 million miles on Air Force One. He was there, in the Situation Room, as the president and his team sat in quiet exasperation waiting to see if the mission to kill Osama bin Laden was successful. And he was there in Newtown, Connecticut, two days on from one of the darkest moments in the history of the United States of America, when Obama was tasked with trying to comfort the 20 families who'd lost a child a few weeks before Christmas.
The photographer's tenure passes with the president's, and Souza's time in the White House is up. It's not his first time with this feeling: He also served as White House photographer under President Ronald Reagan, and that reservoir of experience—along with a spell in between at The Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau—allowed Souza a unique frame of reference as he captured Barack Obama's presidency.
Souza seems singularly captivated by his most recent subject, and has put together a new book offering a photographical retrospective on the Obama Era, titledObama: An Intimate Portrait. He sat down with Esquire.com this week to remember some of his old boss' most tense and frustrating moments, reflect on the differences between Obama and Reagan as subjects, and give his take on whether that really is Vladimir Putin hiding in the corner of one of his most famous photographs.
The photo where President Obama's bending over so a little boy can touch his hair. At that moment, did you immediately realise the shot was extraordinary?
Not really, because it happened so fast, and it was unexpected. I have one frame of that. There's not a series of pictures. I don't usually have my camera set on fast motor drive or anything. So I didn't even know that I had gotten the photo until the end of the day, when one of the photo editors sent me that frame and I was like, "Oh. That's pretty good."
What's an example of one you knew was great right in the moment?
It involves another little kid. When the president was lying on the rug of the Oval Office and hoisting Ben Rhodes' daughter. There was just the scene itself, where I had several frames of him picking her up like this. But it was that he was lying on the rug of the Oval Office, with this little kid. You knew that was going to be a special moment.
The photo you took of President Reagan in Moscow, where you captured a guy to the side who looks a lot like Vladimir Putin. I've read you're sure it's him?
No, I'm not sure. To give the backdrop of this story, this was in a book that I had published after Reagan was president. Ten years after the book was published, I got an email from some random guy who seemed to be steeped in history. e outlined why this was Vladimir Putin. I never would have thought about it when I published the book. Putin wasn't really on the scene [at the time], right? But this guy made a good case for why this was him: The so-called tourists that were in Red Square were really—we knew they were KGB families.
I wondered about it, so I contacted the Reagan library and the National Security Council at the Bush White House. It was during his administration that I'd gotten this email. The Reagan library wasn't sure, they didn't know any way to check. Someone at the National Security Council at the Bush White House emailed me back and said, "It could be him, but we can't say for sure."
So jump ahead to 2009, when I was first hired to do the Obama job. I did an interview with Steve Inskeep of NPR, and this came up in discussion. And I made it sound, wrongly, like I was convinced that it was Vladimir Putin, when in fact there was no concrete proof. So I don't know. It's still a mystery to me. But the Russians have denied that it's him.
I like it because it could be a convergence of these two major figures of history. Did you feel like that was a dimension of the job?
What I did notice was that, obviously the Oval Office is the Oval Office. Both Reagan and Obama used the same desk—the infamous Resolute Desk. So that always played in my mind, that here's two different guys, using the same desk. And then you'd get yourself involved in similar situations. There are these traditional events that happened: Fourth of July, Christmas parties, the Turkey pardoning that happens every year. You see two different men going through the same ceremonial aspects of the presidency. So that always played in my mind.
But the one that really knocks me for a loop a bit is when I went and photographed Prince George, who was two at the time, meeting President Obama. Then I have this picture of his grandmother, Princess Diana, dancing with John Travolta at the White House during the Reagan White House. Those two are interesting bookmarks in my career.
Did you feel a certain pressure, that if you lost focus for a moment you could lose some piece of history?
Oh, yeah. I was afraid of not being there. I didn't take any vacation the first five years, because I didn't want to miss anything. You never know when history is going to happen, right? You also don't know which people in the room might be important down the road. There's probably people in my wide-shots in the Oval Office or the Situation Room—people that were lowly aides—who in 20 or 30 years might be Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense. I was always thinking about that, in a way.
What's the most tense—or intense—room you've ever taken photos in?
Oftentimes it would be in the Situation Room, but it could be in the Oval Office. It could be in some hallway. It could be outside the Oval Office on the colonnade. Those palpable moments were all the time. Not all the time, but a lot. Dozens of times throughout his presidency.
Probably the one time when people didn't realize how tense it was, is when Congress almost refused to raise the debt ceiling. It was three weeks of him trying to reason with Congress, and I hope he writes about that time. Because it was very palpable for very many days. And part of it is that it's confusing to explain. There's no soundbites on what this really means and how you solve it and why it was important. But it would've been catastrophic for our country, and it went right down to the wire.
What are you hoping to convey with this book, about both Barack Obama and the office of the Presidency?
That was the challenge: to try to put a book together that's a narrative of his presidency, while at the same time trying to depict what he was like as a person—as a human being. I think that's also an important part of being president: how you interact with others, how you conduct yourself. Yet also trying to include the broad sweep of the presidency: cool pictures of Air Force One, scenic shots of the White House. The challenge was trying to balance those types of pictures with the more historic or the more emotional or even some fun moments. Because I couldn't do a 2,000-page book, right? I could do maybe a little over 300 pictures.
I'm hoping I got it right. I've been asking people who worked in the White House then to give me their feedback, because I want people who knew him and experienced some of the things that I did to feel that I got it right.
What were the similarities between Obama and Reagan as subjects, and as people?
As subjects, Reagan was more formal, and he was 50 years older than me at the time. He wasn't as outgoing as President Obama outside the office. And President Reagan—I mean, it was a different era. This was the '80s, when magazines were doing much more lit portraits; even Time or Newsweek would do kind of staged photos of the president where they would set up lights and they would have him do this. And he was very understanding of that, and accommodating.
Whereas President Obama didn't mind me tagging along with him all the time, shooting candid photos and documenting everything. But he didn't necessarily like doing these magazine covers. He didn't like doing photoshoots. So if a magazine was coming in to do a cover photo, they would not get much time. Because he would be like, "OK, you took 10 shots, how many do you need?"
The one similarity in their personalities is they were both pretty laid back. It was hard to get either of them riled up—but each of them could get riled up, and I saw it happen on many occasions. But they had this even disposition, that's probably a good characteristic to have if you want to be in that job. Because so many stressful things are thrown at you, and if you're going to overreact to every little thing, you're going to have a hard time getting through the presidency.
That sounds like a contrast with the White House's current occupant. If he were to offer you the White House photographer job now, would you take it?
No, but I wouldn't have done it for Hillary, either. The 24/7 grind for eight years just wears you out. Hillary wouldn't have offered me the job, because she already had a photographer and I was getting ready to help her in the transition. Because, you know, we all thought, right? But even if Hillary had said, "Can you stay on to help Barb?" I would've said, "I really need to just let go."
Trump is, for everything else, a compelling subject for a photo. What have you noticed about photos of him?
I guess the one observation I would make is that there just seems to be a lot of posed, looking-at-the-camera photos. I'll leave it at that.
Who was the most captivating foreign leader to photograph?
I really liked Angela Merkel, but she was a difficult subject. Justin Trudeau came in the last eight months or a year, and because he was the new, young leader of our allies, and seemed to be comfortable with a camera being around. He was a good subject. But even some of the more tense world leaders: With Putin and Netanyahu, sometimes there was an interesting dynamic taking place between the two of them.
The handshakes?
Yeah, or even just the body language when they were talking to each other
Were there photos that you captured, really good ones, that you had to spike?
President Obama met with many Gold Star families—families of soldiers killed in action. He also met with a lot of families where their loved ones had been killed in a tragedy, whether it be a mass shooting or a natural disaster, like a tornado. We did make some of those public, but for the most part, they stayed private. We would send copies to the people pictured, and oftentimes they would give them to their local newspaper. That was fine with the White House, but we didn't want to be the ones to make those photos public.
Now, occasionally we did. And actually for my book, I thought it was important to include a picture from Newtown. We went two days after [the shooting]. I found what I thought was the right photo. President Obama met with all those families for about three hours, spending time with each of them. I thought it was important to show one of those. But I didn't want to do it unless I could get the OK from the family. So I chose what I thought was the best photo, and drove up to Newtown and showed the family my book before it was published. Just the layout of the book, and where I wanted to use the photo, and they said they would be honored to use it. I think it was because it was put in the proper context of his presidency, and not just released as one solo photo out there.
But all these photographs are saved, they're all now at the National Archives. I shot almost two million photos in eight years, and every single one is there. There's a process for when those photographs can be made public. So eventually, unless there's some overriding national security reason, they all will be.
