Tomorrow morning, U.S. voters will be going to the polls. They will know doubt want to review Barack Obama’s performance in office before filling in their ballots. His first presidential term was historic: as the first black man elected to the country’s highest office, Obama has kept many of his campaign promises, battling the economic crisis, introducing health-care legislation, and leading the fight against terrorism.
Since 2009, the White House chief photographer, Pete Souza, has drawn a unique portrait of Obama’s presidency: moments of solitude and reflection, triumph in public, family intimacy, meetings, handshakes, etc. We see the president but also the man, the husband, the father, looking as laid-back as always.
Souza met Obama in 2005 and followed him during the 2008 campaign. In an interview with Time magazine, he spoke about how he started covering Obama: “I was looking for things that I knew that if he ever became President you would never see again,” he says. “[Obama was] walking down a sidewalk in Moscow in 2005 and no one recognized him. I realized that if he ever became President, you would never, ever see a photograph like that.”
As photojournalism, Pete Souza’s work is comparable to that of the photographers for Life who, at the time, formed closed relationships with public figures. The hundred or so images selected by Souza are proof of a new era, where private moments are just as easily diffused as traditional pictures. They contribute just as much to the president’s cult of personality as to his image as a common man.
Jonas Cuénin
Pete Souza, The Obama White House
Until November 10th, 2012
Leica Gallery
670 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
(212) 777-3051
