Souza covered Obama's arrival to the Senate in 2005 and met him for the first time on Obama's first day in the Senate. In 2004, Jeff Zeleny, now a political correspondent for CNN, asked Souza to take photographs for a project documenting Barack Obama's first year as U.S. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he was among the first journalists to cover the war in Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul. Souza has also worked as a freelancer for National Geographic and Life magazines. Between 19, he was a photographer for the Chicago Tribune Washington, D.C., bureau. Souza at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2022Īt the end of the Reagan administration, Souza continued to be based in Washington, D.C. In the early 1980s, he was a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times. Souza started his career in the 1970s in Kansas at the Chanute Tribune and the Hutchinson News. Souza graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in public communication from Boston University and a master's degree in journalism and mass communication from Kansas State University. He is of Portuguese ancestry both sets of his grandparents emigrated from the Azores. Souza was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the son of a nurse and a boat mechanic.

He was a photographer with The Chicago Tribune, stationed at the Washington, D.C., bureau from 1998 to 2007 during this period he also followed the rise of then- Senator Obama to the presidency. Peter Joseph Souza (born December 31, 1954) is an American photojournalist, the former chief official White House photographer for Presidents of the United States Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama and the former director of the White House Photography Office.

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