Obama and his dog Bo on the South Lawn of the White House in 2009. A journalist from the Washington Post later asked the campaign if he meant to reference the rapper, and his adviser Tommy Vietor responded that the candidate “has some Jay-Z on his iPod”. When Obama brushed his shoulders, the crowd roared. He always had a nod or dap that indicated a common feeling even where there weren’t common politics. There was much he wasn’t willing to do materially, and just as much he was willing to do emotionally. Here was the Talented Tenth, the black elite that turn-of-the-century white liberals had thought capable of real leadership, only somehow transfigured so that he was of the national ruling class and not just the “black community”. I first thought he would win when he responded to Hillary Clinton’s attacks in the primary by brushing dirt off his shoulder, the way Jay-Z had done years earlier. Obama is too charismatic for it to be otherwise, and the shortcut he offers between here and some peaceful, prosperous future is simply too attractive. This image will probably hang over us for some time. Scanning through An Intimate Portrait – published almost exactly a year after the election that rejected Obama’s legacy – it is now clear what we were sold: someone finally made good on restoring JFK’s Camelot. His coterie included some of the best-credentialled black figures in government and entertainment. Taken as a whole, we saw a man who was young and handsome, dressed sharply and had a beautiful family. The Martin Luther King Jr photo, which was reprinted in Souza’s 2017 book Obama: An Intimate Portrait, fits easily within the photographer’s body of work. To accomplish the first, you shoot a lot. How could a single person be black and capable of moving everybody beyond race?Īnybody with Souza’s job has two imperatives: don’t miss the moment, and don’t make the president look bad. “Obama is a black candidate,” he wrote, “who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race.” The ensuing years bore out the impossibility of that widely held belief, but it was already evident in the language. In the thick of the 2008 primary, in an essay titled Native Son, George Packer argued that after a half century when “rightwing populism has been the most successful political force in America”, there was finally hope for an alternative. Progress would deposit us in a place where black would be pure style – a style that the ruling class could finally wear out. This was an image of a postracial nation, where postracial didn’t mean liberation – it meant a US where race was solely affect and gesture, rather than the old brew of capital, land and premature death. Over time, Souza helped create a new image of race in the US. But, in retrospect, who Obama was and what he represented endures in the public imagination thanks to the work of the White House photographer Pete Souza, a longtime photojournalist who first had the assignment under Ronald Reagan. During Obama’s campaign, the artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous “Hope” poster, was widely acknowledged as his key iconographer. From the beginning, Obama’s team was invested in constructing a certain image of what would be deemed a “historic” presidency.
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