Former Obama photographer Pete Souza on his Mass. roots, David Ortiz, and throwing ‘Shade’ at the current president
The Bay State native was an official photographer for two White Houses. Now, he's using his photos to make a point about Donald Trump.
Growing up in Massachusetts, Pete Souza didn’t initially intend on getting into photography, much less capturing behind-the-scenes moments of not one but two United States presidents. Ideally, he wanted to be in the press box at Fenway Park.
“My hope was actually to become a sports writer,” Souza told Boston.com in a recent interview.
However, during his junior year at Boston University, where he was studying communications, the South Dartmouth native said he took a photography class and “immediately” realized that’s what he wanted to do.
Even though he said the class was “mostly basic stuff” and that he was a “slow learner” picking up the technical side of the craft, Souza found the whole process — from taking the initial photo to developing the film to entering the dark room and seeing the print “come to life right before your eyes” — to have a magical quality. Plus, it was better than writing.
“Writing was hard,” he said. “And with photography, it was magic to me.”
Souza graduated from BU in 1976, but it was hardly a direct path from there to the White House.
He applied for a few photography jobs in Massachusetts, but was unsuccessful — “My portfolio wasn’t that great” — and ended up taking a shipping job for his uncle in New Bedford at a nautical-themed gift wholesaler called Moby Dick Marine Specialties.
“I guess I could have gotten a job at Amazon based on that experience,” Souza said. “I could have stayed with this business and moved up the ladder, per se. But I wasn’t happy doing it.”
After a year, Souza began applying to graduate schools and was offered a teaching assistantship at Kansas State University. Despite never previously traveling west of New York, he decided to accept and packed up his car and drove out to Kansas.
“My friends and family thought I was crazy,” he said.
But that would be the least of his travels.
After getting his master’s degree in journalism from KSU, Souza worked at a few local newspapers in Kansas, before taking a job as a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times and then, in 1983, as an official photographer for President Ronald Reagan. After six years embedded in the Reagan White House, he toggled back to news photography, freelancing before taking a job in 1998 as the national photographer in the Chicago Tribune‘s Washington D.C. bureau.
In 2004, after future-President Barack Obama was elected to the Senate, Souza and Tribune reporter Jeff Zeleny, who now works at CNN, were assigned to do a series of articles on the then-Illinois senator’s first year in Washington, D.C.
“I got a lot of behind the scenes access with him, went on a couple foreign trips with him, and so he sort of got to know me professionally and saw how I worked,” Souza said.
After a several years closely covering Obama, Souza apparently found an admirer in Obama. About three weeks before Obama’s first inauguration, Souza says he was asked to come along for the ride as the president’s chief photographer. And he wasn’t the only South Coast native in the White House.
David Simas, one of Obama’s top political advisers and a Taunton native, also joined the administration in 2009. And in 2013, Fall River native Ernest Moniz joined Obama’s cabinet as Energy Secretary. All three men — reigning from the disproportionately Portuguese region of southeastern Massachusetts — even shared common ancestral roots, specifically parents or grandparents who were born in the Azores and immigrated to the Bay State, according to Souza.
“There was kind of a little bond between the three of us,” he said.
Unlike Simas and Souza, Moniz didn’t travel as much with the president. However, Souza says there was one instance in which the trio were able to get a photo together on Air Force One.
However, Souza also points to Moniz, a longtime MIT professor and nuclear physicist, as an example that he says illustrates the major difference between the Obama administration and the current leadership under President Donald Trump.
“I mean, there’s a guy who’s a nuclear physicist and was instrumental in negotiating this Iran Deal, and Trump just dismisses the Iran Deal without really knowing what’s in it,” he said. “There’s not much thought given to some of the decisions he makes, which I think is going to become painfully obvious the longer we have him in office.”
It’s that sort of juxtaposition that Souza has been trying to highlight with imagery in his new book, Shade: A Tale of Two Presidencies.
Adapting his popular Instagram account — which he has used, perhaps to excess, to subtly rebuke the actions and rhetoric of Trump since he took office — into a book, Souza says he’s trying to showcase “what’s happening today contrasted with the way a normal president behaves.” In addition to photos that can’t be found on his Instagram account, Shade provides context and background on the inspiration for Souza’s latest photo missive, whether it be contrasting the two presidents’ respective relationships with their wives — or with a foreign ally.
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“People say that I’m trolling Trump,” he said. “But what I think I’m doing is just telling the truth through these comparisons.”
Shade is the second book Souza has released since leaving the White House; the first, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, was a sentimental coffee-table book featuring 300 of the nearly 2 million photos Souza took of the former president. Shade, on the other hand, is an “every table book,” according Souza, who declined to pick any single, quintessential image.
“You can’t sum up all the craziness [in one photo], because he’s done so many outrageous things, whether it’s calling you guys, the press, the enemy of the people or denigrating our intelligence services or thinking the Justice Department is his own Justice Department, not the country’s Justice Department,” he said. “The book is an entity that I think speaks truth to the craziness that he’s doing.”
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All that said, Souza hasn’t been completely consumed by politics since leaving the White House. He’s all been freed up to pursue projects that indulge some of his other, perhaps more initial, interests.
Last year, he was granted behind-the-scenes access to photograph David Ortiz on the day the Red Sox retired the former slugger’s jersey. The end result was a photo essay published in The Players’ Tribune. Souza, a lifelong Red Sox fan, said the project was a “thrill.”
“I’ve been a Red Sox fan since I was a kid,” he said. “Of course, the Red Sox sucked when I was a little kid, but I would still go to games with either my dad or my uncle.”
According to Souza, the up-close access to Ortiz for the day didn’t do much to change his impression of the fan-favorite Sox legend.
“You sort of never know what people are really like, but he’s just a genuine, fun-loving guy,” Souza said. “I got to sit in on a podcast that he did that day with Pedro Martinez and they were talking about growing up in the Dominican. He’s just the way you want him to be. I just found him just a really standout guy.”
Souza says he would “certainly” accept more sports assignments, but wouldn’t try to compete with the professional photographers who capture the action of the games on a daily basis. Between the pace of the action and the amount of equipment sports photographers have to carry, Souza says it takes a completely different set of skills and training.
“The guys and gals that are doing that kind of work — I just could never be as good as they are,” he said.
While he does have hopes to shift back once more into news photography, Souza says his future plans post-book tour are still somewhat open.
“I’ve got a few ideas that are still percolating, but nothing definitive yet,” he said.
Of course, Shade also only covers the first 500 days of Trump’s presidency — which means there could be at least 961 days of “craziness,” as Souza would say, that won’t be included in this year’s edition.
“You have to end the book somewhere,” he said. “A lot of people keep saying to me that I have to start working on volume two. I kind of want to move on to something else, but we’ll see.”
