Jacob Philadelphia touches the head of President Barack Obama after Jacob had mentioned that his friends told him his haircut was just like the president's, 2009. Pete Souza.
The International Photography Hall of Fame in St. Louis is set to induct its newest class of inductees on October 29. The live virtual awards ceremony will be hosted by Art Holliday and honor 2021’s class of photographers and industry professionals. Among them are fine art photographers Dawoud Bey, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sally Mann, and Joyce Tenneson; photojournalist and Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza; and David Douglas Duncan and Larry Burrows, who are being posthumously honored for their work as a war correspondents.
National Geographic Photo Ark founder Joel Sartore and Professional Photographers of America, the largest nonprofit trade association for professional photographers, will also be presented with awards at the event. An accompanying exhibition featuring the honorees opens October 30.
We caught up with Souza, who shot millions of photographs in his time in the White House under both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, to talk about his career, his current projects, and entering the Hall of Fame alongside other photography giants.
What sparked your interest in photography to begin with?
I took a photography class in my junior year of college at Boston University and just the magic of making the picture, developing the film back in the black and white days, and then watching that print appear in the developer under those red safe lights in the darkroom...it was just the whole magic of that that really just caught my interest in a way that probably nothing else had.
What did that journey from Boston to The White House look like?
I think it was basically a lot of luck. Hard work and a lot of luck. It's interesting to go back and look back on my career now and look at the decisions I made and the people I met and the turns I made along the way. So much of it is luck and then trying to make the most of those lucky situations. I mean, in particular, with President Obama, I had taken a job as the Washington-based photographer for The Chicago Tribune in 1998. And then lo and behold, this state senator becomes a U.S. senator in 2004. And it was natural for me to be assigned to document his first couple of years in the Senate. So he got to know me professionally. I think he sort of liked the way I went about my business. So when he was elected, the president asked me to be his photographer. That's a lot of luck there, but once I had that opportunity, I think I showed that I was the right person for that job and took it seriously. I tried to create the best visual archive of a president that had ever been done.
You’ve definitely been more visible to the general public than past White House photographers.
I think part of that is just that he happened to be president and I happened to be the White House photographer when social media exploded. It was natural for, whatever administration that happened under, for them to take advantage of that. We were posting images on Flickr, and I don't know that anybody uses Flickr now, but at the time, in 2009, it was something that a lot of people were going to to look at photography. I think because of that people got to know, if not me, they got to know my own work. And shortly thereafter, Instagram came along and in 2013 I started my own White House official Instagram account. And so people got to know me through that. I also worked as a photographer during the Reagan administration, and nobody's familiar with that work because there wasn't social media. It was just a different time.
President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, 1988. Pete Souza.
What was it like following the same subject for so long?
I tell people, put yourself in [President Obama’s] shoes. All of a sudden you have this guy that's shadowing you every day, photographing you. And I think any human being would be a little unnerved by that. And I obviously was aware of how that must feel for him. So there was sort of this easing in period...and it got to the point after a few months where it was just totally accepted. He understood that I was recording these pictures for history. Some of them were being seen in near real time, but for the most part...I mean, I shot 1.9 million photos. Maybe there's less than 1 percent that people have seen.
You get to know somebody and their idiosyncrasies, and you can almost predict sometimes how they're gonna react to certain situations. I tell people this story about one time when we were in Rhode Island. So we're flying in on the helicopter. I happened to be on the backup helicopter that day, which lands before Marine One. And there's the motorcade right by where the helicopter is going to land. I go and position myself by the ocean, which is like 50 yards away, and the secret service agents are like, “What are you doing over there?” And I go, “Well, he's going to get off the helicopter, and he’s going to walk down to the water.” I just knew he was going to do that. And that's exactly what he did. I could just predict those things.
From this massive archive you’ve been able to produce two books, Obama: An Intimate Portrait and Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents. How was it like putting those together?
The first book I wanted to be the definitive photo book on his presidency as seen through my eyes. I made a decision to do it chronologically so that you can kind of weave in all these different compartments of his life. In other words, like a day could consist of some stressful getting in the situation room, and two hours later, his daughter stops by the Oval Office and he's a dad for a minute. And the pictures are not necessarily from all the big events of his presidency, but just trying to humanize him as I saw things unfold. I insisted we have the best printer, the best kind of paper, all the things to make it a really nice coffee table book that hopefully people that bought it will have for their whole lives.
While I was putting that book together, I had another side job going on. And that was shading Trump on Instagram. When the coffee table book came out, it was published and I started doing interviews. Everybody wanted to ask about my shade, not necessarily about the book, and I wouldn't indulge. I think it was probably into the next year that I was just getting so upset as to what was happening in the country. I felt that people were almost normalizing the Trump presidency and were just becoming numb about it. So I went to my publisher and said I want to do [Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents]. There were many people who thought it was wrong of me to even be commenting about things on Instagram, wrong for me to do this book. But like I said at the time to people who questioned me, I'm not an active photojournalist, and above all I’m an American citizen. I felt it was my duty to speak out, because I thought the presidency was being disrespected. And I thought that I had a unique vantage point having worked for both a Republican and Democratic president to let people know how I felt. It was not even that difficult, that decision for me to take that step. I felt I had to do this.
A Trump support yells in the face of Darin Hicks during a post-election Trump rally that coincided with a Black Lives Matter rally at the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, 2020. Pete Souza.
What does your work life look like these days?
Somehow I keep busy. I do a fair amount of speaking. The past 18 months had been almost all virtual, but I did my first in-person talk a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got a couple of traveling exhibits, one on Obama and one on Obama and Reagan. Those got kind of sidelined a little bit by COVID because a lot of museums and galleries were not open. But hopefully that's going to start back up. And I've got another, in fact I'm printing another exhibit for Portugal. I usually do all the printing myself. I'm doing a fair amount of nature photography, which may eventually be a little book in five or 10 years. My main photographic subject these days is my granddaughter. Sometimes I think I take more pictures of her than I did Barack Obama. She's a very well-documented almost 2-year-old.
I'm working on this other book that's related to The White House, but there's not a single picture of Obama in the book. It's sort of like what it was like to be inside the “presidential bubble.” It shows a lot of the scenes that I saw away from my main subject. I'm working on that with a book designer and struggling to write the introduction right now.
What does it mean to you to be inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame with this class?
Truth be told, I didn't know there was such an entity, as the International Photography Hall of Fame. Once I got the letter telling me about this, it was kinda like—Wow. I looked at who else has been inducted, and it’s all these people that I studied when I was in college or when I was first starting out in photography. And I'm like, holy shit. I'm on the same list as Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith and Dorothea Lange. I'm totally overwhelmed and, uh, honored to be an inductee for sure.
What would you like people to know about your work in the accompanying exhibition?
I guess the only thing is that when you go through the current and past inductees to the Hall of Fame, you realize how broad the subject of photography is. My genre of photography is trying to make authentic moments.The pictures that I've done throughout my career are sort of like what you'd call on the fly, human life as it happens. I'm not the kind of photographer that is directing subjects or using auxiliary lighting. That's my approach, and I have done that both as a White House photographer and as a photojournalist, working for both magazines and newspapers. I'm obviously best known for my pictures of President Obama, but I think in the exhibit, you'll see some of the other work that I've done throughout my career.
Princess Diana dances with John Travolta during a formal dinner at the White House, 1985. Pete Souza.
