'Obama's People'

Photographs by Nadav Kander
The New York Times Magazine
1.18.2009
In December and early January, the photographer Nadav Kander shot 52 portraits of Barack Obama's top advisers, aides and members of his incoming administration. Kander and The Times Magazine's director of photography, Kathy Ryan, discuss putting those portrait sessions together and what happened behind the scenes.

Want to catch a glimpse of the people behind our new President? See them captured in a photo gallery on The New York Times' website, complete with audio and behind-the-scenes photos + commentary. So interesting to see them up close... more candid and captive on my laptop screen. I am struck by how young and experienced they seem.

More, from an editorial about the feature:

IN “CAMERA LUCIDA,” his searching reflection on how photographs convey their meaning and emotional power, Roland Barthes suggests that any time a subject steps in front of a camera to have his portrait taken, four people show up: who that individual thinks he is, who he wants others to think he is, who the photographer thinks the subject is and whom the photographer will try to make use of to bring about his art. To take a subject out of his environment and situate him under elaborate lighting before a sheet of white, seamless paper for 10 or 15 minutes has a way of heightening the tensions among those various self-presentations. A traditional portrait produced by a painter over the course of many sittings is an accrual of impressions building toward something conclusive; photographs like those Kander creates draw their power from the charge of brief encounters — theatrical moments of physical and psychological arrangement: what is Robert Gates saying (about himself? to the camera? to us?) with that parade-ground stance of his? Is Rahm Emanuel's unflinching, impatient stare aimed at Kander — or at Capitol Hill?