Photographer Pete Souza looks back at his career ahead of Hall of Fame induction
Full interview here: https://www.stlmag.com/culture/visual-arts/pete-souza-talks-iphof-induction/
What sparked your interest in photography to begin with?
I took a photography class in my junior year of college at Boston University and just the magic of making the picture, developing the film back in the black and white days, and then watching that print appear in the developer under those red safe lights in the darkroom...it was just the whole magic of that that really just caught my interest in a way that probably nothing else had.
What did that journey from Boston to The White House look like?
I think it was basically a lot of luck. Hard work and a lot of luck. It's interesting to go back and look back on my career now and look at the decisions I made and the people I met and the turns I made along the way. So much of it is luck and then trying to make the most of those lucky situations. I mean, in particular, with President Obama, I had taken a job as the Washington-based photographer for The Chicago Tribune in 1998. And then lo and behold, this state senator becomes a U.S. senator in 2004. And it was natural for me to be assigned to document his first couple of years in the Senate. So he got to know me professionally. I think he sort of liked the way I went about my business. So when he was elected, the president asked me to be his photographer. That's a lot of luck there, but once I had that opportunity, I think I showed that I was the right person for that job and took it seriously. I tried to create the best visual archive of a president that had ever been done.