White House Photographer Releases His Own Sort of Memoir in a New Book

Photography News

Eric Draper, who was the official White House photographer throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, has recently compiled his images from that iconic experience into a new book, “Front Row Seat”, which is due to be published very soon. It is already available for pre-order from Amazon. George Stephanopoulos reports on the release on ABC’s Sunday Spotlight:

The work offers the closest thing you can get to a personal insight into the life of such a public figure. Through Eric Draper‘s photographs, we can begin to recognize the personality of this man who, throughout his career, inspired such heated and controversial feelings through his policy decisions that the essence of him as a human being tended to fall by the wayside.

Regardless of your personal feelings for him and his administration, he was a part of history, for better or for worse. Draper’s work allows us to peer inside his Oval Office, and perhaps helps us to begin to understand why things happened the way they did.

Of course, these are still official White House approved photographs, and as such are only showing us what we are allowed (and encouraged) to see. With that taken into account, though, we can still find something new in these visual stories about a very powerful man with a childish heart.