1. Peter Joseph Souza was born on December 31,1954 and is an American photojournalist, the former chief official White House photographer for Presidents of the United States Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama and the former director of the White House Photography Office.
Pete Souza was a photographer with The Chicago Tribune, stationed at the Washington, DC, bureau from 1998 to 2007; during this period, he followed the rise of then-Senator Obama to the presidency.
Pete Souza is of Portuguese ancestry; both sets of his grandparents emigrated from the Azores.
Pete Souza started his career in the 1970s in Kansas at the Chanute Tribune and the Hutchinson News.
Pete Souza served as an official White House photographer for President Ronald Reagan from June 1983 until 1989.
Pete Souza was the official photographer for the funeral services of Ronald Reagan in 2004.
Pete Souza has worked as a freelancer for National Geographic and Life magazines.
In 2004, Jeff Zeleny, now a political correspondent for CNN, asked Pete Souza to take photographs for a project documenting Barack Obama's first year as a US senator.
Pete Souza covered Obama's arrival to the Senate in 2005 and met him for the first time on Obama's first day in the Senate.
Pete Souza documented Obama's time in the Senate, following him on many foreign trips, including those to Kenya, South Africa, and Russia.
In July 2008, Pete Souza published a bestseller photo-book The Rise of Barack Obama, featuring photographs between 2005 and 2008.
Pete Souza was an assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University's School of Visual Communication.
In May 2009, Pete Souza began using Flickr as an official conduit for releasing White House photos.
In 2010, National Geographic produced a program about Pete Souza titled The President's Photographer, which featured Pete Souza as the main subject while covering the previous White House photographers.
Pete Souza's photograph taken at 4:05 pm on May 1,2011, in the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden, featuring Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, quickly became an iconic image.
Pete Souza's team included David Lienemann, the official photographer for Joe Biden, and Lawrence Jackson.
In November 2011, Pete Souza was included on The New Republics list of Washington's most-powerful, least-famous people.
In 2017, Pete Souza received a book deal from Little, Brown and Company to publish a book of photos from his tenure as White House photographer titled Obama: An Intimate Portrait: The Historic Presidency in Photographs.
In January 2021, Pete Souza gave advice to Adam Schultz, the incoming Chief Official White House Photographer for President Joe Biden.
Pete Souza noted that the photographer for outgoing President Trump, Shealah Craighead, had posted "very few behind the scenes pictures" to Flickr during her tenure.
In 2021 Pete Souza was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.