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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Picture this, you're five years old, too young to fully understand politics and power, but old enough to understand that visiting the President in the Oval Office means the whole family has to dress up, even you. A little dress pants, pressed white shirt, and a real tie knotted up the neck, and when you meet him, this tall, important, somewhat intimidating man called President, you work up the courage to ask him a question, "Excuse me, sir, but my friends say we have the same haircut. Is your hair really like mine?" The President, well, he responds by bending low and saying, "Go ahead and touch it and see for yourself." Just picture that. How important you'd feel, how seen. Can you picture it?

Pete Souza: My name is Pete Souza, I was the Chief Official White House Photographer for President Obama and I was also a Official White House Photographer for President Reagan. I'm the author of the new book, The West Wing and Beyond.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Pete Souza did picture this, literally, capturing one of the most iconic moments of President Obama's eight years in office when he photographed five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia, gently rubbing the president's head in the Oval Office on May 8 of 2009. It's just one of hundreds of thousands of photos Pete Souza took during his time as chief White House photographer. It's the image we've come to expect from Souza. Now he's out with a new book, and it's quite different, The West Wing and Beyond: What I saw Inside the Presidency. This is a very different book of photography. It's not your first book of White House photography, but this one feels different in so many ways. How is it different to you?

Pete Souza: I think it's more personal. It's more personal of some of the things that I saw while I was inside the Obama presidency that are not of the president. [chuckles] He is not a subject of this book. There's a Where's Waldo effect in some of the pictures where he's like in the background out of focus, or he's in the foreground out of focus. I was zeroing in on the many people that helped make the presidency work.

Some of the unique places that I was in terms of like, inside the cockpit of Marine One, the helicopter, showing what that's like, being on Air Force One and showing some of the interesting layout of that plane. There's a section in the book called Inside the Spare and the spare was the duplicate or the decoy limousine identical to what we refer to as the beast, and what I saw from that vantage point inside that limousine. It's a much more personal and much more different book than the Obama intimate portrait.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's so much labor happening in these images. It's interesting when you say personal because I can understand why it would feel personal for you as someone working, but it didn't so much feel personal to me, but it felt like, "Oh, right. This is all the work that doesn't normally end up in the frame, right?" All of the-- From the stage, folks who were putting up the stage to folks who are taking a quick nap to the elevator ride, like everything that it takes to create the thing that we respond to as a public as the presidency.

Pete Souza: Well, I think I say personal because essentially, my job was to document the president of the United States. I've been a photographer a long time and I always know that if you look a little to the right or left or behind you, you sometimes see something that's interesting, that says something about the presidency, that isn't the President. I was trying to give people my personal view of some of the things that I saw that I thought were important within the context of being inside the presidential bubble, if you will.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's a lot of photos of others taking photos as well. This is perhaps just the reality of the time in which you were the chief photographer, but I love all of the images of the level of excitement on the faces of kitchen workers, or ordinary folks who are meeting the President and you're getting the shot of them taking their cell phone pictures.

Pete Souza: Yes. One of my favorite pictures is we were at a fundraiser and the President was speaking, and of course, everybody's listening to what he's saying. Meanwhile, at the back of the room, there's the bartender with a little circular bar. In that moment, he's not being a bartender, he's being a guy with his iPhone trying to snap a picture of himself. I was looking for those little moments that tell you about what it's like to be inside that bubble.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What is the day like for the chief White House photographer. Goodness, there is a lot going on. How many photos in a day, how many frames are you taking, and when are you taking the time to be able to figure out what you're going to make use of?

Pete Souza: I think every day was a little bit different. I do know that I shot 1.9 million photos in eight years. Essentially, I'd show up at eight o'clock in the morning, and I'd go home when the President was done at night shortly thereafter. It was some pretty long days, some days were 18, 20 hours, especially when we were overseas. A short day would be 11 hours or something like that. I was there a lot, and I was committed to documenting for history the presidency so I felt that I always needed to be there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk about documenting the history. I think people know that you were the Chief White House Photographer for President Obama, but maybe know a little bit less about your time in Reagan's White House. You've got some interesting juxtapositions in this book. Can you talk to me about what felt different in those administrations?

Pete Souza: Yes, they were 20 years apart. I started the job with President Obama 20 years to the day after I left the Reagan administration. There were some similarities in the sense the way the White House worked, and the logistics of the White House, and the rooms hadn't changed. They had changed a little bit but they're essentially in the same room. I knew my way around, I knew how the White House worked, I knew how logistics worked, I'm talking about like motorcades and helicopters and planes and stuff like that.

That was invaluable to have had that previous experience. The differences I think were, we're talking about the '80s versus the 2010s. A lot of changes in the world, everything had changed. We shot film during Reagan, we shot digital during Obama. There was no such thing as social media during Reagan, and then during Obama, it was wide open, the internet was wide open, there was internet, there was Twitter, there was Instagram. It didn't really change the way I did my job, it did change the way our pictures would be utilized by the White House.

During the Reagan administration, if we were to do a "photo release", we would make prints and then give them to the TV stations and the AP and UPI, whereas during the Obama administration, if we were going to release a photo, make it public that is, we will just post it on Flickr, and that was it, and people could download it if they wanted to. The nature of the job didn't change but the way our pictures were used did change between the two administrations.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Because I'm a sucker for pets and farm animals and wild animals of all kinds, I must say that I particularly adore the images of Bo, the first dog, and even the spare duck that would appear here and there. When would you decide to turn the camera on the feathered and furry friends in the White House rather than the people?

Pete Souza: That's all an intuitive reaction on my part. I always had my [unintelligible 00:09:00] out for Bo. Bo was, might call him my Portuguese brother, because we're both of Portuguese descent. For those that come to my talk in New York, Washington, or Atlanta, or wherever I'm speaking, I will show a video of Bo and I which is pretty funny. Bo and I actually had a routine every morning and I'm going to show that during my book tour presentation as part of it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, that was a great tease. I really want to know what you and Bo did every morning. I also want to talk to you a little bit about the voice that you've had since the end of the Obama administration. You have not been quiet in social media and you certainly had a lot to say during the Trump administration. Often you were simply deploying these extraordinary images from the Obama White House as a counterpoint to what we were seeing and witnessing during the Trump years. Can you talk to me about the decision to have that voice in that way?

Pete Souza: It just happened. I was a little outraged by the constant lying that was emanating from the mouth of the President United States. As someone who had served, arguably the most iconic Republican and the most iconic Democrat president in modern history, I felt that Trump was disrespecting the office by making it all about himself and not about us, which is what the presidency is about, it's about helping us, not helping oneself.

I think of myself first and foremost now as a citizen, and I felt that it was my duty to speak out that I thought I had a unique perspective of the presidency to be able to contrast the past with what was happening in the current day. It was not a decision that I made lightly. I just felt that I had no choice. Not that I was out there protesting like John Lewis, but John Lewis once said, If you see something wrong, say something, do something. I saw something wrong and I was going to well say something.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You talk about seeing yourself as a private citizen. You had two pretty great jobs maybe the photojournalism job, at least by one definition of the greatest possible job. You had it twice across those years with Reagan and then in the Obama White House. What are you doing these days?

Pete Souza: I do a fair amount of speaking. I spent more than a year on this book. Obviously, the pictures had already been taken but in terms of trying to make a cohesive book took quite a while to choose images and write my text, which is always the hardest part for me. Then I do a lot of photography, some assignments not that many, but I feel that, in my own publisher, I have such a reach on Instagram that I love to photograph whatever I want to photograph and post it on Instagram, and sometimes it's just a photograph with very few words, but oftentimes I tell back stories to photographs. I post throwback photographs. I think my main subject, who I actually don't post about, is my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter. She's my main subject these days.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We started by talking about the hair like mine photo and I have to say that among my favorites in this new book is just a photograph of a woman on her toes. We just see the feet of the president and the feet of this woman. Actually, I'll let you tell me the story.

Pete Souza: Yes. This was at a campaign event where we would do these OTRs, off the record they're called. He would show up to a restaurant or a bar or a breakfast joint with very little notice. Whoever happened to be there happened to be there and he would walk in, and this was a woman who was there, I believe this was in Iowa and I believe it was her husband take a photo of her with President Obama.

As they were posing for the photograph, she was not as tall as he was, President Obama, I think is six-one, and so was on her tippy toes making herself taller. I saw what was happening and to me, the interesting perspective from my point of view was the knees down showing what was happening. I just thought that was so funny to show just that part of what was taking place in front of me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I agree. I loved it. There was also something about it, that idea that no matter our ideology or our partisanship that, we want our elected leaders to be a little bit bigger than us as humans, a little bit grander, a little bit, something to aspire to get up on our tippy toes and be the best Americans we can be. I don't know if all of that was in the photo, but I read all that into it and I really loved it.

Pete Souza: That's what's so interesting about photographs is that everyone looks at it maybe a little differently and sees something that maybe I didn't intend. The photography is the universal language and, yet people bring their own perspectives to each photograph.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Pete Souza was the Chief White House Photographer in the presidency of Barack Obama and his new book is The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside The Presidency. Pete Souza great to talk to you, and thanks for taking the time with us.

Pete Souza: You bet, Melissa. Thanks for having me on.

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