Opinion: Barack Obama, under the lens

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Talk about being ahead of the curve...

Photographer Pete Souza began making Barack Obama the focus of his work back in early January 2005 -- on the day Obama was sworn in as a U.S. senator from Illinois, in fact.

Obama already was identified as a comer in Democratic politics but at that point, few anticipated how far and how quickly he would ascend. So Souza -- who takes a bipartisan approach to his craft; he served as the official White House photographer for Ronald Reagan-- was able to document much of Obama’s path to the precipice of the Democratic presidential nomination without the impediments that now surround the candidate.

The result is a just-published photo-book, ‘The Rise of Barack Obama.’ More can be read about it and Souza in this post on The Swamp.

-- Don Frederick