Inside the Lens of a White House Photographer with Pete Souza

0:00Well, you can shoot 25 frames and still miss the picture. I think it is important to slow down. And I look at my earlier work in the days when I was shooting film. The most you could shoot was maybe three frames a second. And there's something to be said for making you a better photographer when you're waiting and anticipating and trying to click the shutter at just the right time, as opposed to the burst mode.

0:32Good morning, everybody. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we scour the world looking for remarkable people. Today's remarkable guest, and we've been trying to get him for a very long time. His name is Pete Souza. He's an American photojournalist, and he served as the official White House photographer for both Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. So So to put it mildly, he was around when history was made. I don't know any photographer who has documented modern American leadership with such proximity, such behind the scenes. And his photos are so interesting. His comments are so interesting.

1:15And while he was doing that, he also authored eight major, at least by my count, eight major photography books. And these books are, they're so interesting. They're so beautiful. So welcome to remarkable people. Pete Souza. That's a lot of P's in there. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Guy. I appreciate it. Pete, you and I, we have this commonality called Rick Smolin, and Rick Smolin is a guy that did all the Day in the Life books. So I just want to call him out right at the very start, thanking him for introducing us. I've admired your work from afar for a long, long time. So thank you for coming on.

1:55I got to ask you a question right off the bat. I love your work and I know you're going to be very opinionated about this, but I really want to know what you think of the Vanity Fair photo shoot as a photographer. What do you think when you saw that? I mean, I know Chris Anderson. He calls himself a celebrity photographer now, but I knew him back when he was documenting, as I was, capturing fly-on-the-wall moments. And he also did a portrait session with President Obama when I was in the White House and used the same approach that he used with the Trump people, which meaning up close, he gets close to his subjects, super close.

2:49And he records portraits now. I thought it was an accurate depiction of who those people are. I don't know why they complained about the portrait. There was no AI. There was no retouching. He showed them as they were. So I thought he did a remarkable job in capturing who those people are. I could read between the lines in what you just said, but I won't go there, I think. So as I read about your past, the first question that came into mind besides the Vanity Fair photo shoot of course is how exactly does one become an official white house photographer you were photojournalist on the other side how do you get in-house to ronald reagan or barack obama in both cases it was just a matter of luck in that with reagan the woman who was the white house photo editor at the time carol greenwald was somebody that i knew when i worked at a newspaper in Kansas.

3:53And she was the director of photography at the Kansas City Star. I had aspired to work for that newspaper. I was working for a small newspaper. And I interviewed with her and she did not hire me, which pissed me off, I have to admit. She hired somebody that had more experience than I did. She later became the White House photo editor and had been tracking my career. And so when they had an opening in the middle of Reagan's first term, she called me up out of the blue one day and asked me to interview for this job. So that's how it went with Reagan. With Obama, it was different. I was then the national photographer for the Chicago Tribune based in Washington, D.C.

4:37And when Barack Obama was elected to the Senate, myself and a reporter decided to document his first year in the Senate. For that, I needed access, so I made this pitch to the Obama people. I was basically the hometown newspaper, and they gave me access that they didn't give to anybody else. When you're in close proximity to a subject like that, they get to know you, you get to know them, they get to see how you work. So I had established a professional relationship with Barack Obama early on. So when the time came for him to choose a White House photographer, I got the call. And was there like a job interview per se with Barack Obama or were you already known?

5:20So yeah, this is kind of a fun story. He knew me, he had seen my pictures, he knew how I worked. He knew me enough that when he was elected to the presidency, I sent his top aide an email. And all it said was, I'm interested. That was it. That was my application for the job was, I mean, I didn't need to show them a portfolio. They were familiar with my pictures. They were familiar with my personality. They knew how I worked. So that was it. I just sent an email and said, I'm interested. And a couple of weeks before the inauguration, I got a call from that top aide saying that the president-elect wanted me to be his chief white house photographer.

6:08That sounds a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be. I think if you're here to ask any of us that have been in that position, we all have different ways of coming into the administration. Mine was that I had known the guy for four years, and he was familiar with me professionally. And I think he just thought I would be a good fit. Okay. So, I don't know if you really want to answer this question, but from the outside looking in, can you just verify that the Obamas are as cool as they seem? You would really know if this is true. I suppose you won't say if it's not true, but just, I'm not asking you to burst the bubble, just confirm the bubble if the bubble is true.

6:49You can't fake who he is. He is who he is, especially with the kind of photographs that I made throughout his administration. I'm kind of the fly on the wall, and you can't fake that. It is what it is. I actually just saw him, was it last week? I was in Hawaii on vacation and saw him, and he's as cool today as he was during his presidency, a little bit more relaxed, I think, these days. Does he still stay in Kailua or is he on the south side of the island now? I'll just say that he's in Oahu. I'd rather not go beyond that. All right. All right. All right. I'm from Hawaii, so I'm pretty familiar here.

7:30I want to verify a story that Barack Obama used to read 10 letters from citizens every day. Is that a true story? It's a true story. I would say he did that five days a week. He didn't do it seven days a week. but every Monday through Friday, he would read 10 letters. There was a White House Correspondence Office that received upwards of 10 ,000 letters a week, and they would sort the letters and categories and try to pick a sample. And they weren't all positive. They were critical letters, issue-oriented sometimes, very personal sometimes. And Fiona, who was the head of the correspondence office, of course, I'm forgetting her last name, would be the one responsible for choosing the final 10 that he saw.

8:21And I can verify that that actually did happen. A book came out by, I think, Jean-Marie Laskus is her name, called To Obama. And it's a book about those letters. Fascinating book. I suppose that Donald Trump gets 10 letters a day from billionaires. The tradition continues, right? So you have a book along the lines of what you saw inside the presidency. So can you give us some insights into what you saw inside these presidencies? I think what I saw more than just the historical aspect of documenting the presidency in both instances, I got to see the humanity of the human being that is the president.

9:09They're human just like us. And it was a great privilege and honor to be able to see these two men up close and personal and see their humanity just as a human being. And whether you agree or disagree with the politics of President Reagan or President Obama, I can say that both were genuinely decent human beings. And can you tell us a little bit about the decision-making process? One of the culminations was the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and you have that famous picture. But what proceeds in the decision-making process like that? I'll use a different example. I remember when one of the first things that Barack Obama had to decide when he took office was how to proceed regarding Afghanistan.

10:07Was it time to pull out completely? Was it time to put in more troops? What was the decision? It went on for months. He had so many meetings with his national security folks, trying to really sort through what was the best approach, what was needed. And there was not universal agreement amongst his aides on how to proceed. So a lot of whether he ended up adding, I forget how many troops it was, But it was a long, long process over the course of many months in making a decision that important. Then there's other times when decisions have to be made quickly. And now I'm going to forget exactly the circumstance.

11:01But I remember one time with Reagan, and it was backstage at some event, where his national security advisor said, Mr. President, this is going on. We want to do this. And Reagan said, go ahead. And it was that quick. It was because the decision had to be made right away. And I think anybody who's in that office, well, let's say any normal person that's in that office, needs to know when it's time to make a quick decision or when it's time to really get as much information as possible in terms of a crucial decision, especially in the national security world. Well, seeing as how you were there when those kind of decisions were made, I'd love to find out which Netflix series would you say is the most true to life?

11:57We got designated survivor. We got Homeland, we got West Wing, we got The Diplomat. And you could also make the case in the Trump administration, it's Saturday Night Live. But which of these series are most realistic? They all have their flaws. Honestly, I haven't watched some of the series. I've watched, you know, The West Wing, which was, I think, pretty much a 90s show. I watched all of House of Cards. And I've watched the three seasons of The Diplomat. There's some truth in all of them. I remember the West Wing used to crack me up because President Bartlett would go into the situation room and it'd be like a two-minute meeting and he'd make his decision on something that probably would have taken at least an hour and a half in real life.

12:45But for TV, it's one minute and he's out of there. That used to crack me up. The Diplomat is more about relationships with the husband and the wife, and yet there's a lot of, I think, truth in some of the substance of that series. So I would say probably the West Wing. One thing that was true to life about the West Wing is in the span of one episode, President Martin Sheen may be dealing with four different issues, which is so true, you know, in the presidency. Barack Obama would go from one national security tense meeting to one domestic meeting to just one thing after another. And I think that was depicted pretty accurately in the West Wing.

13:42you're listening to remarkable people with guy kawasaki can we geek out a little bit about photography now i've talked enough about reagan and obama i'm really interested in the photography of this first of all can i ask you what is the workflow from you know so now the pictures are on your sd card how does it get from the sd card to what's actually being used what is the workflow here? The workflow was obviously different between Reagan and Obama. With Reagan, it was all film, and with Obama, it was all digital. Normally, the workflow for me was I would be with him literally all day, and maybe twice a day, I would drop my cards from my cameras in my office, And one of the photo editors would pick up my cards and download the pictures.

14:36And one of the things that we did was make sure that every single photograph had a caption. I would start with a basic caption of whatever I had photographed. And then we would go back and add people's names in every picture. So now, at the National Archives, where all my pictures now reside, every single picture was saved. None was deleted. and every single picture has a AP style caption. And we tried to identify every person in a photograph. We sort of arbitrarily decided if it's 10 people or less in a photograph, we're going to identify everybody. If it's like 100 people group photo or something like that, we wouldn't necessarily identify everybody.

15:21I don't know if that's what you're asking, but that's kind of the way the approach that we did. And then in terms of for the White House website, each day the digital team may come to me and say, hey, the president met with Angela Merkel today. We're going to do a post. Can you send us a couple of photos? And myself and one of the photo editors would choose what we thought were the best photos and send those to the digital team for the website. So that's kind of the way it went. And when the download from the SD card occurred, did you put it in Lightroom or what was the software to keep these millions of pictures?

15:58So when I was working for a newspaper, Chicago Tribune, I had started using Photo Mechanic. And so that would be the initial way we would download the photos and caption them is through Photo Mechanic. And then in terms of once you chose an image in Photo Mechanic, it would be opened up in Photoshop. And we would go through a workflow there. Basically, my instructions to my staff was, you can adjust color balance, shadows, highlights. That's about it. We didn't want to get into anything beyond photojournalistic practices in terms of use of Photoshop. And how many photos are in the National Archives from you?

16:46So with Obama, it's just under 2 million. I think it was 1.9 something million. And with Reagan, I'm not sure because we didn't really count individual frames. We were shooting film, and I don't even know how many rolls of film I shot over the five and a half years I was there, but probably several hundred thousand is my guess. Maybe a million, I don't know. And the copyright for these photos, they belong to you or they belong to the government? So anything that was made public would be public domain. And then there's a period, like, for instance, all the Reagan pictures now are public domain.

17:30So every single picture, I think it's 15 years after the president leaves office, all pictures are considered public domain. Now, there's an asterisk there in that if it's a personal, like, for instance, Christmas morning, I would go to the Obama's rental house in Hawaii where they spent Christmas and get him with the girls in their pajamas opening Christmas presents. Those pictures are considered personal, and the former president can decide to keep those personal for now. My guess at some point, Sasha and Malia can make a decision if they want to make those public. So there's an asterisk in terms of personal pictures versus non-official pictures.

18:21They're all in the National Archives, but they can remain private for as long as the former president wants them to be. And maybe I'm being a little paranoid here, but is it conceivable that a current president would want to, shall I say, whitewash the past and remove those photos from the National Archives? I would say that that would be legal. You know, there's a Presidential Records Act that was passed after Watergate that makes that illegal for him to do. But he also stole a bunch of classified documents. So who knows what he'll do. Can I just geek out a little bit more on cameras and stuff?

19:04Yeah, sure. Okay. How would you define the Pete Souza look? What is your look? My look is authenticity. I'm kind of working on my archive, especially pictures that people have never seen. And I'm not talking about from the presidencies, but from my earlier work. And there's a common thread, I think, throughout all the work that I've ever done, both at the White House, newspaper, I worked for National Geographic for a little bit. I was always striving to capture a moment, a precise moment in time. Obviously, you want to get my framing and composition right. But more than anything, it was trying to click that shutter at the exact right time to capture an authentic moment.

19:52And I think that is what I've strived to do throughout my career. I do it today with my photographing my granddaughters. I'm still looking for those moments. I've got to believe those great moments was Barack Obama and the hair, right? The little kid's hair. One frame. I have one frame of that. I was pretty much a single frame guy. Like in these cameras today, you can do 20 frames a second, but I would always try to do one click and wait for just the right precise second. I have one frame of that picture. It's funny, you know, not to drop names or anything, but I saw Steven Spielberg a few years ago.

20:35And I'd never really had a conversation with him, but I forget where I ran into him. And he's very interested in still photography, even though he's a filmmaker. And he asked me the question that nobody had ever asked me, which was talking about hair like mine. He said, what's the frame right before that? And what's the frame right after that? And I have to go back and look. So the frame right before that picture of the kid touching his head is Barack Obama is bending over before Jacob, the little boy, touches his head. That's the frame right before is Barack Obama bent over. than the picture that people are familiar with where he's touching his head.

21:21And then the very next frame after it is Barack Obama's touching Jacob's head, which I thought is sort of like a nice little sequence there. Yeah. Wow. So are you Canon, Nikon, or Sony? I've been both Nikon and Canon. I use Nikon in the Reagan White House and Leica. Nikon and Leica in the Reagan White House. In the Obama White House, I used Canon, mostly because at the time, the Canon digital cameras were much quieter than the Nikon. The Nikon digital camera, it was very loud. The Canon was considerably quieter. And that's why we went with Canon during the Obama administration. Nowadays, I don't think it matters with the mirrorless cameras.

22:14Nikon, Canon, Sony, they're all equally good. You can flip a coin in terms of it's, I think, more of a personal preference. I still use Canon today, just because I've become familiar with their system. And when you were on these Barack Obama assignments, how many cameras were you carrying? I usually carry two cameras, one with a wide-angle lens and one with a short telephoto lens. Which leads me to my next question, which is, if you could only have one lens, what lens would it be? In terms of like a fixed lens, I would say a 35 millimeter lens. If it was a zoom lens, I would say the 24 to 70. Okay.

23:02And are you always shooting raw or are you shooting JPEG? Always raw. Okay. And are you set to auto, aperture, manual, or shutter? What priority system do you use? Yeah, you know, I'm kind of old school. I do everything on manual. I love photography. So, you know, when I have a chance to ask somebody like you this kind of questions, I got to jump for it. All right. So now, completely transitioning here. In your wildest nightmares, did you ever think that our political system could degrade to what it is right now? Let's say this. Okay. At the end of the Obama administration, after Trump was elected, I was worried for the country.

23:48Seriously worried. The elections in November, inauguration is in January, so you got two months. to process it all. And throughout that time, I had dual emotions playing out. I'm talking about the end of 2016, early 2017. One, I was so worn out. I was physically worn out. I was mentally worn out. Doing this job for eight years, just always on the clock, never taking a sick day. I was ready and looking forward to the end. And yet, at the same time, I was really worried for the country. Because it was clear to me that this guy was going to fuck things up, to put it mildly. And he did. It was clear.

24:38But we survived. Biden was elected. And after what happened on January 6th, I was like, we're finally done with this guy. That's it. his political career is over. And then when he was reelected, I mean, I was in shock. And then I had the opinion that, you know what, we survived him last time. And really, it will be okay. Not really realizing how bad it was about to get. And I think it was, the guardrails are off. At least during his first term, he had some people around him that did not let him do more damage than he could have done. And now he's just surrounded by sycophants who will just do whatever he asked them to do.

25:43And somebody was asking me about this the other day, and I said, what I'm worried about the most is why would any of our allies ever trust us again? He has done so much damage around the world. And you can see how other leaders are reacting. If our country elected him twice, they got to be thinking the American people are the one who elected this guy. So how can we trust the Americans anymore if they're going to elect somebody like him again. So that's what worries me the most, is our friends in other countries never trusting us again. I think that's my biggest concern. And I don't mean to ask this in the sense of demanding anything, but this is purely a question of information and curiosity.

26:39There's no hidden agenda. What are you doing? What can Pete Souza do, who served for two presidents, knows all this stuff? What can you do in such an existential struggle? One of the things that I've chosen to do is kind of remind people what a normal presidency is like. And so I don't have a Twitter account or X or whatever it's called. I actually kick myself off of there because it's just very toxic. And so what I try to do is make my points on Instagram with photographs, throwback photographs, or I have documented some of the protests and rallies that take place locally or close by And just remind people the positive aspect of having an empathetic and decent human being as our president, especially for people who are just coming of age to pay attention to politics and the presidency.

27:49I'm talking about like high school and college kids. They're now thinking it's okay to bully somebody because the president does it, or it's okay to lie constantly because the president does it. No, that's not okay. And I'm trying to like show people here's a better way is having somebody who is decent and empathetic towards our fellow human beings. And you don't have to talk that way. You don't have to talk down to people. You don't have to bully people. And hopefully, I know from the comments that I get on Instagram, I think people appreciate some of the throwback photos that I post. I would say, Pete, that your Instagram account is one of the few places in all of social media that's really worth watching and following.

28:46The photos you post and the things you say, they're so powerful. They're so empathetic. It's just a beautiful post. My hat's off to you for your Instagram feed. Yeah, thanks. Up next on Remarkable People. Well, you can shoot 25 frames and still miss the picture. I think it is important to slow down. And I look at my earlier work in the days when I was shooting film. the most you could shoot was maybe three frames a second and there's something to be said for making you a better photographer when you're waiting and anticipating and trying to click the shutter at just the right time become a little more remarkable with each episode of remarkable people it's found on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

29:47I would like to know conceptually, I don't know how old they are, but what do you tell your grandchildren about this age? Because I have a grandchild who's a couple years old. I'm like, what am I going to tell them about this time? My granddaughters are three and six. So, obviously, the three-year-old is too young. The six-year-old is starting to sense, you know, I think she overhears us talking to other adults and I think is kind of aware. I mean, she said to me the other day that Donald Trump is icky. And I was like, I didn't even know she knew who Donald Trump was. So I think that that is another concern is that the people that do support Trump, they're going to pass that support on to their kids and grandkids.

30:41And that's a little scary, too. But as the granddaughters get older, I think I'll be able to talk to them in a more intelligent way about our political system and how important it is to. I mean, I said to the six-year-old the other day, I said, we, the people, are the ones who decide who our leaders are going to be. And just try to make her understand that the way it's supposed to work is that we, the people, are in charge. And I'll take this as an opportunity to say I'm so proud of people in Minneapolis for standing up. It's pretty incredible what they have done in terms of pushing back against these thug tactics that are taking place.

31:33To be out there every day in sometimes below zero temperatures, it's been pretty incredible to watch the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul and elsewhere in Chicago. But just an incredible response by we the people. I wonder if a state could get a Nobel Peace Prize. They really merit that prize. They do. And I will give the same kind of kudos to my brotherhood of photojournalists in Minneapolis and Chicago, and also citizen photojournalists. the two murders of Alex Priti and Renee Good are because citizens film that. So kudos to them and to my photojournalist friends that are braving threats and tear gas and everything else to document what's taking place.

32:32Pete, I have one more question for you. So from the outside looking in and watching your work and looking at your books i think you are just the absolute remarkable ninja warrior storyteller so i want you to answer the question using a camera how do you tell a story you know in many ways i'm still trying to figure that out i think i've always tried to do it through a singular image and it's you know it's like what we talked about right in the beginning is like that precise moment, that really, like picture of, you know, Jacob Philadelphia. It's like that picture does not need that many words to describe.