Former White House photographer to speak at USC

Listen to this article

Pete Souza, the former chief White House photographer for President Barack Obama and an official White House photographer for President Ronald Reagan, will speak at the University of South Carolina on Sept. 26.

The talk, entitled “Eyewitness to History: Behind-the-Scenes Photographs from the White House and Beyond,” is the College of Information and Communications’ annual Buchheit Family Lecture. It is open to the public and will be held at 7 p.m. in the W.W. Hootie Johnson Performance Hall in the Darla Moore School of Business.

“We teach students to use words, pictures and video to tell great stories,” said Andrea Tanner, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. “Souza is arguably one of the best visual storytellers of our time, and we can all learn a great deal from him.”

Souza chronicled the Obama presidency through two million photographs, more than 300 of which are featured in his latest book, “Obama: An Intimate Portrait,” which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best seller list when it was released in November 2017. Souza will share his award-winning photographs as well as personal reflections on covering two U.S. presidents.

“Over the course of eight years in the White House, I probably spent more time with Pete Souza than with anybody other than my family,” Obama wrote in the book’s foreword.

Souza, a freelance photographer based in Washington, D.C., has also covered international stories as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist.

The university’s Buchheit Family Endowment provides undergraduate scholarships and graduate and doctoral fellowships to journalism and mass communications students. The Buchheit Family Lecture series was created in 2000 in honor of the late Phil Buchheit, the former publisher of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and former president and chairman of newspaper management organization Mid-South Management Co.