SMOOTHING OVER THE CRACKS
“HE WAS A TESTAMENT TO THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF THE STRUGGLE THAT PRECEDED HIM
From the beginning, Obama’s team was invested in constructing a certain image of what would be deemed a “historic” presidency. During Obama’s campaign, the artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous “Hope” poster, was widely acknowledged as his key iconographer. 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. Over time, Souza helped create 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. Progress would deposit us in a place where black would be pure style – a style that the ruling class could finally wear out.
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. “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. How could a single person be black and capable of moving everybody beyond race?
The figure Packer describes, and the mystique Obama cultivated, is messianic. Throughout his presidency, Obama strained to make clear that he was not a radical, but when it suited him politically, he was content to place himself in that tradition. In one of Souza’s most famous photos, taken at night, Obama is silhouetted by the light bouncing off the monument to Martin Luther King Jr and looking off in the same direction as King. The image is well exposed but not particularly noteworthy in its own right, except in its implication. The man was a testament to the success and failure of the struggle that preceded him.
Anybody with Souza’s job has two imperatives: don’t miss the moment, and don’t make the president look bad. To accomplish the first, you shoot a lot. To accomplish the second, you edit well. The Martin Luther King Jr photo, reprinted in Souza’s 2017 book Obama: An Intimate Portrait, fits easily within the photographer’s body of work. Taken as a whole, we saw a man who was young and handsome, dressed sharply and had a beautiful family. His coterie included some of the best-credentialled black figures in government and entertainment.
