Photographic Presidents

Throughout U.S. history, presidents have participated in photography as subjects, producers, and consumers of photographs. Yet few scholars have examined the 180-year relationship between presidents and photography in any depth. Photographic Presidents studies how presidents shaped and participated in transformative moments in the history of the medium: George Washington, who more than 50 years after his death emerged as a crucial subject for early photography in a nation eager to consume portraits of elite leaders; John Quincy Adams, who in the early 1840s lamented in his diary his failure to get a good daguerreotype; William McKinley, whose 1901 assassination set off a morbid race to find and publish the dead president’s “last photographs”; Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, each vexed by encounters with “candid cameramen” with the capacity to catch their subjects unaware; and Barack Obama, whose use of social media photography embodied the tensions inherent in early twenty-first-century digital photography. From its introduction in 1839 to the present day, photography has introduced new visual values that have often clashed with existing social and cultural norms. As representations of elite leaders who symbolized the nation, presidential photographs became sites of tension in which the implications of these new visual values played out in public.