Pete Souza Didn’t Miss a Thing

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You took nearly two million photos of Barack Obama as his chief official White House photographer. Everyone knows the situation-room photo, everyone knows “Hair Like Mine.” Can you tell in the moment when a picture is going to go viral? Most of the time you’re sort of aware that you’ve captured a really important moment. The day of the bin Laden raid, I think I shot like a thousand photos. The one of the little kid touching his head, it just happened so fast I didn’t realize the significance of the photo until I actually saw it at the end of the day.

What is your favorite photo that isn’t famous? It’s a picture of the president on vacation in Hawaii. He’s got his arm around Malia, and on the right side of the frame is Denis McDonough on the phone, about to hand the phone to the president for a conference call with his national-security team after the underwear-bomber incident. It shows when two worlds of being a dad and being a president collide, and that happens when you least expect it.

Did having such an intimate look at the inner workings of government for eight years affect how you personally consider politics? I can’t tell you how proud I am to have seen that there are actually a lot of people trying to do good. I was a photographer in the Reagan administration, and I would say the same thing about them.

You had to travel everywhere that the president traveled, but you weren’t the president. Did you ever think: Look, do you really need photos of this trip? I’m exhausted. I took one sick day in eight years, and there were times where I didn’t feel good, but I still came in. If you’re truly going to document history, you don’t want to miss anything.

You took only one sick day in eight years? I had a colonoscopy, and I had to go under anesthesia. I was ready to go in, but the doctors said it would not be a good idea.

Did you ever find the job boring? Oh, it was boring a lot, like watching paint dry, because the situation is so similar: The president’s seated in the same chair in the Oval Office, and you’ve got the same people sitting on that sofa, and even though they’d be talking about something different each time, visually it looks the same.

You’ve said that your job was to visually document the president for history. Did you also see it as your job at all to make the president look good? I can’t say that I was trying to make him look good. It kind of cracks me up that people have asked me about this — was I supposed to wait until he was picking his nose, and then that’s the picture that you should have made public?

Did President Obama ever seem as if he was aware of the camera? No. The first time I ever met him, I was working for The Chicago Tribune, and I spent his first day in the Senate with him, and I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t bother him that I was tagging along with him all day. There was almost no awareness of the camera, which is unusual with a politician, and that’s why he’s a good subject: He just goes about his business, and I went about mine.

So you never thought that he was clenching his jaw a little tighter or staring pensively out the window because he knew you were in the room? No, I just became part of the scenery. I once got in an argument with him about whether I had actually been in a meeting or not. He just always assumed I was there.

You’ve been using Instagram to juxtapose the Trump and Obama presidencies. Some would describe it as trolling Trump — for example, when Trump used two hands to drink from a bottle of water, you posted a photo of Obama holding up a glass of water with one hand and the caption: “One-handed.” Do you think Trump has noticed? I have no idea, and quite frankly, I don’t really care one way or the other.