Barack Obama’s entrance onto the national stage augured a potential rupture in the race image. Only a few short years after Dave Chappelle had joked bitterly about the impossibility of a black President, there was one. History was moving too quickly. What ensued was a frenzied struggle for control over the race image across media. It seemed Obama offered a way to secure a position for black people at the heart of the American project without forcing too much critical examination as to whether such a thing was possible, or even desirable.
From the beginning, Obama’s outfit was invested in constructing the boundaries for representation of what would be deemed a “historic” presidency. During Obama’s campaign, the artist Shepard Fairey was widely acknowledged as his key iconographer. But — especially in retrospect — who Obama was and what he represented endures in the public imaginary 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 the liberal counter to the race image. Postracial didn’t mean liberation — it meant an America 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 “right-wing 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 both 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 both 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, which was 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-credentialed black figures in government and entertainment. In 2016, Jonathan Jones, an art critic for the Guardian, wrote that Souza’s photos were important works because they confirmed that Obama had “made the White House an African American home for eight years.” Though he stretched the vogue for using a racial category as a generic modifier to its comical conclusion, Jones got at these images’ essence when he described them as “the soft power of the Obama age.” 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.