"Obama: An Intimate Portrait," by Pete Souza

I have seen some of Pete Souza’s brilliant photos of President Barack Obama in various publications and online, so it has been a treat to peruse those and many more photos collected in his large-scale, beautifully produced and printed volume “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” (Little, Brown, 2017). The book is elsewhere dubbed a “visual biography” of Obama during his years as president. Souza was granted what seems to be complete access to him and his family, his staff, and his meetings with other government officials and international statespeople. Many of the photos are taken in the White House, but others are are from various sites around the country and the world. Souza is highly adept at capturing important and telling moments, whether serious or relaxed and even humorous. Loving moments with his family are particularly touching, as are photos of the President engaging with small children, often in the Oval Office; he leans or kneels down to talk with them, or even lies on the floor to hold an a baby overhead; his sincere affection for these young children is palpable. There are of course also photos of the difficult times when the President and his staff had to deal with crises and tough decisions. The wide variety of photos in a wide variety of settings show the President as the thoughtful, serious, compassionate, caring president and person he was; whether or not one agrees with every decision he made, these characteristics are palpable in the photos. The photographer took nearly two million pictures during the eight years of Obama’s presidency, and over 300 of those are included in this book, along with very light annotation (mostly the pictures speak for themselves). This book, as I turn its pages now in the context of living under the current administration, makes me extremely nostalgic for those eight years.