Peter Joseph Souza (born December 31, 1954) is an American photojournalist, the former Chief Official White House Photographer for Presidents of the United States Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama and the former director of the White House Photography Office. He was a photographer with The Chicago Tribune, stationed at the Washington, D.C., bureau from 1998 to 2007; during this period he also followed the rise of then-Senator Obama to the presidency.
Table of Contents
- 1 Early life
- 2 Career
- 2.1 Early career
- 2.2 With Ronald Reagan
- 2.3 With Barack Obama
- 2.4 Post-Obama administration
- 2.5 Obama: An Intimate Portrait
- 2.6 Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents
- 2.7 Dream Big Dreams: Photographs from Barack Obama's Inspiring and Historic Presidency (Young Readers)
- 2.8 The President's Photographer: Fifty Years Inside the Oval Office
- 2.9 The Rise of Barack Obama
- 2.10 Images of Greatness: An Intimate Look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan
- 2.11 Obama: An Intimate Portrait, Deluxe Limited Edition
- 2.12 The Way I See It
- 2.13 The RBG Workout Bobblehead Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- 2.14 A Promised Land
Early life
Souza was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the son of a nurse and a ship mechanic. He is of Portuguese ancestry; both sets of his grandparents emigrated from the Azores.
Souza graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in public communication from Boston University and a master’s degree in journalism and growth communication from Kansas State University.
Career
Early career
Souza started his career in the 1970s in Kansas at the Chanute Tribune and the Hutchinson News. In the to the fore 1980s, he was a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times.
With Ronald Reagan
He served as an official White House photographer for President Ronald Reagan from June 1983 until 1989. He was afterward the recognized photographer for the funeral facilities of Ronald Reagan in 2004.
At the terminate of the Reagan administration, Souza continued to be based in Washington, D.C. Between 1998 and 2007, he was a photographer for the Chicago Tribune Washington, D.C., bureau. Souza has furthermore worked as a freelancer for National Geographic and Life magazines. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he was in the middle of the first journalists to lid the achievement in Afghanistan and the slip of Kabul.
With Barack Obama
In 2004, Jeff Zeleny, now a diplomatic correspondent for CNN, asked Souza to take photographs for a project documenting Barack Obama’s first year as U.S. senator.
Souza covered Obama’s beginning to the Senate in 2005 and met him for the first time upon Obama’s first morning in the Senate. He documented Obama’s time in the Senate, following him in many foreign trips, including those to Kenya, South Africa, and Russia. In the process he not abandoned became near to Senator Obama, he ended stirring following his rise to the presidency. In July 2008, Souza published a bestseller photo-book The Rise of Barack Obama, featuring photographs surrounded by 2005 and 2008.
Souza was an partner in crime professor of photojournalism at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication After the November 2008 election, he was asked to become the endorsed White House photographer for his second era for the other President-elect Obama. On January 14, 2009, the extra presidential portrait was released; it is the first get older that an ascribed presidential portrait was taken afterward a digital camera. A week later Souza was present at the establishment and the considering day he was the lonesome photographer gift for Obama’s second swearing-in on Obama’s first workday in the Oval Office.
In May 2009, Souza began using Flickr as an endorsed conduit for releasing White House photos. The photos were initially posted afterward a Creative Commons Attribution license which required that the original photographers be credited. Flickr higher created a other license which identified them as “United States Government Work” which does not carry any copyright restrictions.
In 2010, National Geographic produced a program not quite Souza titled The President’s Photographer, which featured Souza as the main subject even though also covering the previous White House photographers.
Souza’s photograph taken at 4:05 pm upon May 1, 2011, in the Situation Room during the raid on Osama box Laden, featuring Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, quickly became an iconic image. It also became one of the most viewed images on Flickr. Souza’s 2009 image of a five-year-old child, Jacob Philadelphia, touching Obama’s head has with become iconic. Jacob asked if Obama’s hair was similar to his and the image has become figurative of the African American suffer for civil rights.
As the official White House photographer, Souza traveled subsequent to the president to document each meeting, trip and warfare for historical record. Along subsequently his staff, Souza produced in the works to 20,000 pictures a week. Souza’s team included David Lienemann, the qualified photographer for Joe Biden, and Lawrence Jackson (later the credited photographer for Vice President Kamala Harris).
In November 2011, Souza was included on The New Republic‘s list of Washington’s most-powerful, least-famous people.
As skillfully as using very high end cameras for his presidential photography, Souza occasionally took square shots on his iPhone.
Post-Obama administration
In 2017, Souza customary a book deal from Little, Brown and Company to say a folder of photos from his tenure as White House photographer titled Obama: An Intimate Portrait: The Historic Presidency in Photographs.
Upon Donald Trump’s establishment as president in 2017, Souza began sharing pictures of Obama on his Instagram account, often as essential commentary upon the supplementary administration. In April 2017, he had higher than one million Instagram followers, and reached two million partners in August 2018 as he continued to critique the Trump management through contrasting photographs of Obama. In 2018, he announced the liberty of a additional book titled Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, juxtaposing the Obama and Trump administrations.
In late 2019, Pete Souza and his relations moved to Madison, Wisconsin.
Souza’s operate in and after the Obama administration is in addition to the subject of the 2020 documentary The Way I See It.
Opinions upon subsequent Chief Photographers
In January 2021, Souza gave advice to Adam Schultz, the incoming Chief Official White House Photographer for President Joe Biden. He after that noted that the photographer for outgoing President Trump, Shealah Craighead, had posted “very few astern the scenes pictures” to Flickr during her tenure.
Last update 2021-08-06