The Portrait Makes Our President

Photographic presidents are shaped by the modes of representation that dominate their era, from daguerreotype to digital. This book has shown that they are challenged by and required to adapt to new visual values that emerge at moments of photography’s technological transformations. These visual values clash with existing social and cultural norms to make presidential photography a site of tension between competing photographic values of the real and the ideal, quantity and quality, public and private, and control and interactivity. Understanding how these tensions played out over time for photographic presidents helps us to recognize how they shape our own experiences of photography as well.