Photographing the President
My camera has found all but one commander-in-chief since 1985
Over the course of my 40-plus years in journalism, I’ve been fortunate to see and photograph — with one notable exception — every president since Ronald Reagan.
With only a handful of months left in his term, I added Joe Biden to my list on Monday as the president honored more than 400 U.S. Olympians and Paralympians from the Paris Games in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.
Thanks to our longtime friend Tom Pratt, a former newspaper colleague in Tyler, Texas, who has worked for every administration since George W. Bush, I was able to attend the ceremony and photograph the rain-or-shine event, held on a damp, drizzly morning.
Because I was not part of the press pool and in the crowd, I took a storytelling approach that attempts to capture what I saw before and during the ceremony. Here are some examples:
Speakers at the event included Olympic swimming gold medalist Torri Huske, Huske’s parents, 2028 Paralympic hopeful and wheelchair basketball player Adrina Castro and Paralympic wheelchair basketball gold medalist Paul Schulte. In 2024, the U.S. won the most medals at the Olympics (126) for an eighth consecutive Summer Games and placed third in total medals at the Paris Paralympics with 105.
The outdoor celebration was a made-for-TV moment during a contentious election cycle, but it was almost thwarted by Mother Nature. Hurricane Helene’s sputtering remnants have been working their way through the Washington, D.C., area, and the gray skies and misty conditions left many in the crowd holding umbrellas and wearing ponchos or rain gear.
The drizzle stopped, almost on cue, as Biden spoke to the Olympians. He said he wasn’t allowed to be in Paris because “I cause commotion when I go places,” later joking that he will be at the Summer Games in Los Angeles since he won’t be president in 2028.
“They can’t stop me,” Biden said, “from going there then.”
Over the Years
I’ve written before about my childhood obsession with the presidents, and I remember being so envious/proud of my father’s story of making eye contact with John F. Kennedy moments before the assassination in Dallas. So you can imagine what sort of personal thrill it has been to be in the same place with six of seven of the nation’s commanders-in-chief over the past 38 years.
The first time I saw a sitting president in person was when Ronald Reagan spoke at the memorial service for the Challenger astronauts at Johnson Space Center on January 31, 1986. Two weeks after my 21st birthday, I found myself at JSC soon after sunrise on a winter morning standing on makeshift bleachers, waiting for Reagan to speak to an assembled crowd of politicians, grieving families and community members, and NASA staff. I can’t find the negatives of the (admittedly not great) photos I took, but I still have the program from the ceremony.
Six months earlier, I had photographed then Vice President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, giving a tour at Johnson Space Center to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife, Sonia. The pictures just OK, in part because the camera I used at the time didn’t have a good zoom lens. But I have three prints that I scanned for my records.
I remember that security at NASA did not feel as tight as I thought it should be, given that Gandhi’s mother, Indira, had just been assassinated the year before her son’s visit. But those were different days in the pre-9/11 U.S. (Sadly, Rajiv Gandhi also would be assassinated in 1991.)
In 1993, I photographed President Bill Clinton at UNC-Chapel Hill’s 200th birthday celebration, ironically on the same day that I met my future brother-in-law, Michael. Unfortunately, those were in the pre-digital days and I can’t locate those negatives either. But I do have photos of Clinton being interviewed by NBC’s Brian Wilson during “Education Nation” in 2012, including this one.
After George W. Bush came into office in 2001, I started a decade-long stint as a member of the National Teacher of the Year selection committee and had the chance to photograph him on several occasions. By this time, I also had a decent camera, as evidenced by these photos taken in 2007, one with First Lady Laura Bush.
During his eight years in office, I was lucky to photograph President Barack Obama on several occasions. I also took photos of his wife Michelle at events in 2015 and 2016.
I never crossed paths with Obama’s successor, but soon after the 2020 election, I did take photos of First Lady Melania Trump at an event at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. Here is one of those images.
And then there was Monday. In his remarks, Biden did not talk about the upcoming election, only mentioning Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris briefly.
“I told her, when she’s president of the United States,and they say, ‘Joe Biden is in the waiting room,’” he said, pausing for laughter and applause, “that she promised me she won’t say, ‘Joe who?’”