It’s one of the most enduring images of President Obama’s years in the White House: five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia patting the president’s hair in the West Wing, just to make sure it felt like his. Philadelphia’s parents had nudged little Jacob to ask Obama a question when they made their visit in 2009, leading to a surprisingly heartwarming moment that was over so quickly White House photographer Pete Souza almost didn’t get the image. 

“President Obama bent over, Jacob touched his head—click, I got one photo, and it was gone,” Souza recalls in the new documentary The Way I See It, a reflection on his years as the official White House photographer for Obama and Reagan. (You can watch the clip about the Philadelphia photo exclusively below.) 

“This photo is one of my favorites,” director Dawn Porter said of the image in a recent interview. “It speaks to the importance of representation. When children see people who look like them in places of power, it lets them know their dreams are absolutely possible.”

The idea for the documentary arose after Souza began trolling President Trump following the 2016 election. For each of the administration’s horrifying moves, Souza had a correlating photo to post on social media. When Trump signed his anti-Muslim immigration ban, for instance, temporarily barring refugees from entering the country, Souza posted a photo of Obama meeting with a Muslim refugee in 2015. When Trump was locked in a bitter Twitter feud with Senator Bob Corker, Souza shared a photo of Obama chatting face-to-face with the senator in a car. When a video of Trump’s cabinet members taking turns to compliment the president one by one went viral, Souza shared a photo of Obama’s cabinet in the midst of an intense session. “A working Cabinet meeting, 2014,” he captioned it. 

His effortless snark, coupled with an astonishingly deep bench of photographs, propelled Souza out from behind the camera and into the spotlight. Souza released a subsequent photo book, the best-selling Shade, and took it on tour, talking audiences through a giant slideshow of some of his most iconic images. The Way I See It was initially envisioned as a filmed version of that tour, but Souza’s outsize career demanded something more full-fledged. Porter and her team filmed Souza on tour, as well as in his hometown of New Bedford, creating a fuller portrait of a man who typically hid behind the scenes. The doc is also a stark reminder of a time before Trump, when presidents weren’t embroiled in personal scandal on a daily basis, or pushing the nation toward totalitarianism.

“The point of the film isn’t that Obama got everything right,” Porter said. “It’s that character matters. I miss the feeling of being able to rely on the office of the president.” 

At one point, she envisioned the high dramatic point of the documentary being Trump’s impeachment by the House, but that idea was dashed when it became clear that this administration was on a continual churn of shocking events. “[We were] thinking, ‘Oh, okay, this is the craziest thing that Trump has done! Impeachment, that’s going to be huge,’” she remembered thinking. “We, at some point, had to stop chasing the news, because it’s so clear that the Trump administration is going to keep on violating the law and shredding the norm of political governance.”

For Porter, the established documentarian behind the Netflix docuseries Bobby Kennedy for President and the John Lewis doc Good Trouble–which she also finished and released this year—working with Souza was unique, largely because the photographer was more hands-on than any of her past subjects. Souza, who took nearly 2 million photos of Obama’s White House years, was vocal about how the images appeared in the documentary, signing off on color correction and cropping. “There was a little bit more artistic consultation than I’m used to,” she says. But she was blown away by Souza’s precision, his ability to remember intimate details of so many of his images, and his skill for pulling up images that spoke to themes Porter wanted to explore in the doc. 

The Way I See It was also unique because Porter had to conduct some interviews remotely due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. She sent Souza a camera with instructions on how to film himself, which the photog found a little daunting.

“Even though Pete is a photographer, he is not a cinematographer. So even the great photographer was a little anxious about operating a camera, which was very funny,” Porter said with a light laugh.

For Porter, working on the Lewis documentary and the Souza documentary back-to-back was a massive undertaking—but enriching because of what the process revealed. “The films very much informed each other,” she said. “Seeing what John Lewis was fighting for and how he was always encouraging people to speak up—that’s exactly what happened with Pete. He was quiet and was the observer, and was content to speak with his camera and keep his opinions to himself. That wasn’t good enough with what we’re experiencing.”

“I’m so glad I’m doing these projects one right after the other, because I feel each of them more deeply,” she continued. “There’s an urgency to both of these for me. They’re both really pleas for people to remember their power, and to remember what really is good about our culture—and to fight for that.”

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