As President Obama’s iconic official portrait is retired for his second term, one of the photographers who helped capture the image posted what appears to be a wider shot from the same shoot that produced it.
Andrew Cutraro worked as an assistant to official White House photographer Pete Souza that day and, according to a Facebook post on Monday, loaned Souza his equpiment on the condition that he take away the ultimate souvenir:
Four years ago, I hastily loaned my lights, camera and lenses to Pete Souza so he could make one of the most historic photos of our generation: The Official Presidential Portrait of Barack Obama. The first digital portrait of a president ever. I only asked for one thing in trade: that Pete go wide on a frame to give proof that I was there. The sequence ending in this final frame is on a Sandisk digital card that is surely in the Smithsonian by now. I’ve never shown this publicly before, but now the second term is here and with it, a newer photo of The President. What a trip.
Cutraro added in a comment that he had to ask the president, who was leaving the office before Souza could take the extra photo, to come back for the final photo. “My game face is a response to Pete probably staring at me in disbelief,” he wrote.
