Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks

Lincoln's somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson's swearing in. George W. Bush's reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama's selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium's transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs—as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation—sparked public debate on these values and their implications.

An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. The Daguerreotype Presidents 1. Photographing George Washington 2. Early Daguerreotypes in the U.S. and the Nation's Capital 3. John Quincy Adams and National Portraiture Part II. The Snapshot President 4. Handheld Photography and the Halftone Revolution 5. William McKinley's Last Photographs Part III. The Candid Camera Presidents 6. Visual News in the Early Twentieth Century 7. Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Candid Camera Part IV. The Social Media President 8. Changing Visual Media from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Digital Age 9. Barack Obama and Flickr Conclusion: The Portrait Makes Our President Notes Selected Bibliography Index Back cover |"Entertaining yet informative. . . Photographic Presidents is an excellent book that brings context and depth to certain decision points within history and how photography shaped them. It takes on a concept often overlooked by scholars as simply there, and moves it front and center into the discussion." —Congress & the Presidency
"Well-written and engaging . . . What will be the next step in how presidents become photographic? Finnegan cannot—and does not try to—answer that question, but the fact that the question resonates in my head after putting down her book is a testament to how thought-provoking Photographic Presidents is." —Journal of American History
"Very interesting and informative . . . Finnegan has covered a lot of ground in this well-illustrated book. She traces the development of the photographic medium and techniques with the history of visual communications and the image of the presidents, and has done it extremely well." —Journal of American Culture
|Cara A. Finnegan is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression and Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs.