Photographing VP Joe Biden in His ‘Battle for the Soul of America’

With the 2020 referendum looming big on the horizon, former Vice President Joe Biden’s official White House photographer David Lienemann is stepping forward to show Americans the real” regular Joe ,” as he lovingly calls the VP.

Lienemann’s 256 -page hardcover Biden: The Obama Years and the Battle for the Soul of America is due to be published by Voracious on September 8th.

Lienemann presents the many faces of Joe, from taking the field for the Baltimore Orioles season opener with granddaughters Finnegan and Maisy to observing the Civil Rights movement with the late Congressman John Lewis in Selma to serving a same-sex marriage of White House staffers to his official duties as former President Obama’s second in command.

” Looking back at David’s pictures, I am filled with deep pride ,” writes Dr. Jill Biden in the preamble.” He captured everything there is: the hours of work, the questions and dialogues, the passions that spanned from such incredible high-flowns to such heartbreaking lows, every hard-fought battle…I know the hope I see in David’s videos is not gone. It is alive, and its supremacy will continue to transform our nation for the better…These pictures refresh me for the challenge onward, and I hope they do the same for you .”

We sat down with Lienemann, as he cradled his 16 -month daughter Millie in their New Mexico home, to hear his legend of the eight years he spent in the White House with the VP and what he misses Americans to see.

David Lienemann( kneeling) images President Barack Obama delivering a statement on Afghanistan, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Oct. 15, 2015. Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr ., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stand with the President.( Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

Phil Mistry: How did the book project to be implemented?

David Lienemann: The diary activity came about when a onetime White House coworker of mine recommends that I should work on a diary soon after Joe Biden swept the representative threshold in the democratic primary. I reached out to my onetime boss Pete Souza who was the director of the Photo Office, who connected me with his agent David Black. I pointed up working with Pete’s publisher as well, Michael Szczerban at Voracious.

Tell us about the photo selection process?

Sure. It’s obviously challenging to narrow down from hundreds of thousands of photos to exactly a couple of hundred idols to try to tell the story of eight years. I really wanted to give readers a feeling of who Joe Biden is. A family man, a man of faith, who ever wanted to know how government policies would affect the working-class people in the neighborhood where he grew up.

The book includes a variety of photos, from the early days of the Obama Biden Administration to the firstly jaunt to Iraq as VP, where he swear in new US Citizens in a 4th of July Ceremony meeting with wounded fighters and agonizing class who lost loved ones to gun violence. The increases and lows of the administration.

Vice President Joe Biden hands remarks at a campaign event at the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Sept. 7, 2012.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

How did the deed” Battle for the Soul of America” come about?

I believe it was a bit of a play on the campaign’s motto,” Battle for the Soul of the Nation .” There was a lot of workshopping of how to acknowledge that it was both a look back at Joe Biden’s eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice President, and also a look forward at a possible Joe Biden presidency.

Which is your favorite epitome in the book?

Favorite image in the book is probably an easier question than favorite idol. There are just so many to choose from! But, in the book, my favorite image is of Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, the Vice President’s oldest lad, and they’re standing backstage at the 2012 Democratic National Convention with Dr. Jill Biden waiting to go on stagecoach. Amidst all the cheering and the music and thousands of parties jam-pack into an stadium in Charlotte, Beau is humbly leaning over to arrange his father’s standoff. There’s something really personal and style about the moment.

Vice President Joe Biden, Dr. Jill Biden, and Beau Biden hold backstage as Dr. Biden is introduced at the Democratic National Convention, at Time Warner Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 6, 2012.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

If you have shot variou idols of a situation, do the not-so-good ones ever get removed, or is each and every one saved to the archive?

All of the images we made are archived. Photos are covered under the Presidential Records Act , who are in need of they be saved and transferred to the National Archives at the end of the administration.

So, if an persona is out of focus, is it still archived?

Yes, out of focus, blurry, I have some really terrible photos in the archives.

President Barack Obama awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction to Vice President Joe Biden during a eulogy in the State Dining Room of the White House, Jan. 12, 2017.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Did you shoot any photos at the White House with your cell phone? Have any gone on the record?

I took a couple of photos on my iPhone for work, and they are in the Archives, yes. I didn’t actively use it to shoot with because the quality of the files didn’t really match up with a better quality of DSLR folders at the time.

Are you trying to be invisible while you are at important powwows?

Always! Which doesn’t mean I never jaunted over something while moving around the room. I tried to use hushed cameras, forestalled twinkle whenever possible, and simply tried to blend in, to not disconcert or take away from what was going on.

How challenging is this job to work in the White House?

I talk about it a little in the introduction to the book. It’s a really unique job and an incredible opportunity as well. You alluded to this earlier, about trying to be invisible while you’re in the room make photos. You want to be there to capture every moment because something that seems banal one day might turn out to be an immensely meaningful moment later on.

At the same time, the more photographs you take, the more there is to sift through, and unfortunately, you can only work so many hours in a epoch. It too can be a bit of a 24 -7 chore sometimes. I labor a lot of vacations and missed a great deal of season with my family. I too assembled my now partner at an occasion with the Vice President.

How much did you tour with the VP?

Honestly , not sure on the mileage as they moved his mileage, and I missed a few cases trips with him.[ I] went on a couple of expeditions with Dr.[ Jill] Biden, safe to say, over a million miles though. Forty-seven states and sixty-four countries, I had to go back and count them all up to make sure the numbers were correct.

Vice President Joe Biden engages in a super soaker battle during the 2016 Biden Beach Boardwalk Bash held at the Naval Observatory Residence in Washington, D.C ., June 4, 2016.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

How countless portraits did you shoot in the eight years?

Just under a million images, we have sought to do a speedy weigh in the last week of the administration, but it was a real whirlwind of backpack up my role, trying to respond to as countless emails as I could, and send as countless photos out as possible.

So, can anybody determine the complete archive of VP photos that you took?

I don’t believe so. I’m not absolutely up to speed on how the National Archives handle records, but I think they become more public over occasion, but I think it’s still administer, to some extent, by request.

Do you shoot JPEG or RAW?

Actually, I shoot both. The first couple of years, cameras exclusively had a single placard slot. We archived the RAW registers, and the JPEGs were just there in case something went wrong with the card since they were slightly easier to recover with file recuperation software. In the later years, when cameras had dual slots, RAW data went on one card and JPEGs to a second card that simply lived in the camera … again as kind of a redundancy in case of card failure.

Vice President Joe Biden drives his restored 1967 Corvette with Jay Leno during a taping of” Jay Leno’s Garage” at the USSS training facility in Laurel, Maryland, April 1, 2016.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Did you revised the photos? What was your software of choice?

Editing in the sense of choosing images, I applied Photo Mechanic to browse idols and label them. I know a good deal of folks like Lightroom for this, and I’ve looked at it but time never have felt as cozy with it. Editing actual idols, yes, in the traditional journalism feel of pasturing, adjusting revelation, and trying to achieve an accurate color representation of a office. But not revising in the sense of adding or removing beings from the room.

What is your deadline for transmission?

Depends, photos for social media, the White House Website, or liberate to the media were prioritized and happened as rapidly as was possible. Posed photos of kinfolks from a photo line after an incident, we tried to get out as quickly as possible, but the process wasn’t perfect. I will note that I was helped with this by Jordan Brooks early in the Administration and Chris Mackler in the later years.

Vice President Joe Biden accosts Syracuse devotees between games at the Final Four at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, April 2, 2016.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Would you ever drastically cultivate, like making a horizontal frame into a vertical photo?

Sure. We had something announced Jumbos. They were massive photos in the West Wing of the White House “thats been” sporadically varied out. I had one horizontal jumbo frame at the end of the hallway, and sometimes I’d photograph batch of verticals and had no problems filling it, and sometimes we were scrambling to try to find something that would crop neatly from a horizontal.

Is it OK to crop out unimportant beings from the formulate?

I think I cropped more because I hadn’t shot the persona the space I demanded, whether the camera was tilted slightly, or I hadn’t ill-used a long enough lens, couldn’t get close enough to achieve the epitome I was trying to create to tell the story.

How do you win the trust of the important people you work within the White House?

That’s an interesting question I “ve thought about” when I was writing for the book, and I’ve talked to photo students about before. There’s obviously the background check slope of working there where the government does a deep dive into your background to make sure you aren’t a see. But improving rely with the Vice President and Cabinet representatives takes time, being respected and plainly not sharing things that are said behind closed doors or announcing on social media.

Vice President Joe Biden progress across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Congresswoman Terri Sewell and Congressman John Lewis, during the course of its 48 th annual Bridge Crossing Ceremony in Selma, Alabama, March 3, 2013.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Did you shoot with zooms or primes? Which ones?

I used both primaries and zooms. When I was in the West Wing or the majority of cases on the road, I had a 24 -7 0 on one camera body, it simply extends so much better collection for these sorts of photos I was building given the access I had. My second camera sometimes had a 70 -2 00, 35, or 85 mm lens depending on what was happening. In rare openings, I’d apply something much longer or wider, but the bulk of my photos were captured on a 24 -7 0mm.

If you had to use only one lens on a foreign jaunt, which would it be?

Foreign travel at the White House? Probably that 24 -7 0, 2.8. In most countries, they had arranged access with my equivalent, and so I wasn’t stuck on a riser 100 feet away. Foreign travel for me as a other citizens? I shoot an sickening slew with a 35 mm lens now, and then for that second lens, something in the super-telephoto range like a 100 -4 00 mm.

Sorry for the interruption. The newborn came in to see what I was up to.

What is the baby’s name? How age-old?

Her name is Millie. She’s 16 months.

Don’t ask how many photos I’ve take into consideration her, I “ve no idea”, but I’m sure it’s a unbelievable number.

Vice President Joe Biden the negotiations with Nate Tamarin, Shailagh Murray, Fran Person, Mike Donilon and Matt Teper about his speech to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters National Convention, aboard Air Force Two, en route to Las Vegas, Nevada, July 1, 2011.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

It will immediately climb to over hundreds of thousands of!

Which cameras did you shoot with?

At the White House, the photo office abused Canon. I too dabbled with Leica, Nikon, and in the last year of the administration, a Fuji X-Pro2, which I adored as a digital rangefinder, plus force/ width and silent shooting. Since the end of the government departments, I’ve consumed both Fuji and Sony cameras.

Was the tone of the screen on the Canon DSLR distracting to Joe?

I candidly don’t think he was. We used[ Canon] 5D cameras, which are pretty quiet, and they are silent. If you’re trying to take photos during a TV interrogation, you want to be silent. If he’s consoling someone who lost their child or their mother or spouse, you want to not confuse from that moment.

Vice President Joe Biden the negotiations with Commander Timothy Wilke, on board the Littoral Combat Ship U.S.S. Freedom during a tactical team demonstration, from the Waterborne Mission Zone on board the U.S.S. Freedom, at Changi Navy Base, in Singapore, July 27, 2013.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Did you use flash where there was no risk of disturbing anybody, like in big seats?

I used flare for photo threads after an contest, which frequently poorly lighted. And I’d occasionally use it outside for photos if the lighting genuinely be necessary to. But I’m not much of a light photographer. I’ve always tried to work with available brightnes as much as possible.

If both Obama and Biden were present, then were both Pete[ Souza] and you shooting simultaneously?

I’m not sure I understand the issues to. Do you entail in the previous administration when they were together?

That is correct when they were meet seam appearances.

Got it. So, when they were in the Oval Office, Pete included it, if they were doing an incident in the Rose Garden or an happening in Pennsylvania or Ohio, then we were both there.

Vice President Joe Biden trips with 4-2 Stryker Troops at Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq, January 23, 2010.( White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Unlike Obama’s official photographer Pete Souza, who had a staff of crap-shooters, you only got backing under special circumstances. When did that happen?

So, we all toiled in the same office and helped one another out when possible. Chuck Kennedy, Lawrence Jackson, and Amanda Lucidon all submerge for me periodically, whether I was trying to take a couple of days off to get away, or if I was traveling with Dr.[ Jill] Biden to visit a refugee camp in Kenya.

Are you allowed to keep the photos from the archive on your personal computer?

I did some work for the Bidens after the administration, so I have some of the photos from my experience at the White House.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor dispenses the oath of office to Vice President Joe Biden, who stands with Dr. Jill Biden, Beau Biden, Ashley Biden and Hunter Biden, during the course of its inaugural swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C ., Jan. 21, 2013.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Can you tell us about the shooting of the official portrait? How long did the session last-place?

From setup to teardown, probably 30 times? I’d been working on other ideas with my colleague Chuck Kennedy, so we’d set up some glowings and phoned in a abstraction a little bit. Then the VP asked if we could try a photo in front of his table at the end of the working day, so while he went to his last rally of the working day with President Obama, I set up a light-colored with a large poster board sized bounce poster. Chuck stood in for got a couple of formulates to make sure everything gazed good, and we moved the computer, telephone, etc. off the VP’s desk.

Did you photograph Biden at his residency as well as the White House?

Sure, he held finds there rarely, hosted foreign presidents for snacks, the Bidens hosted festivities there, anniversary parties.

How did you change from Cornell College with a BA in Economics and Business in 2005 to photojournalism?

I studied economics and business at Cornell College, but realise in my junior year that I wasn’t sure that Excel spreadsheets and crunching figures was how I wanted to devote my meter after graduation. I’d always really liked photography. I’d been freelancing for the neighbourhood weekly article and had wasted some time job shadow at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, which covered eastern Iowa. I was really fortunate to get a string of newspaper internships after college, which gave me a tremendous amount of know in photography. Going to college in Iowa likewise means that I was exposed to a lot of politicians and political pleasure during the runup to the Iowa caucus.

Vice President Joe Biden councils Air force 2 at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland February 11, 2011.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

How did you be brought to an end get picked for this job?

I first photographed Joe Biden, along with the other 15 applicants during 2007 in the lead up to the Iowa Caucus. I participated and was inspired by his ability to connect with Americans on the campaign trail as a” regular Joe .” He always took the time to talk to all the members of the room.

So, when he was picked as the VP nominee, I started reaching out to everyone I knew in his office to see if I could join information campaigns as his photographer. And when he got sworn in as Vice President, I moved to Washington and affiliated the photo office about six weeks later.

What was it like for a 24 -year-old, when you started at the White House?

It was an incredible experience. I’d acted as a freelance photographer covering the campaign in 2007, so I embraced then-Senator Biden and Senator Obama and of all the other applicants that were running in 2007 -0 8. But as you alluded to, going from being a journalist to a 24 -year-old White House photographer, traveling with the Vice President of the United District all over the country and all over the world. It was a really, incredible opportunity to get to serve in the Obama Biden administration.

President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden motioned to the crowd as confetti rains down, following the President’s election night remarks at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 6, 2012.( Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Are you going to be handle the Biden campaign?

I cured photograph the big-hearted commencement rally in Philadelphia last year and submerge a few other occurrences along the way. I’m not sure, given the COVID-1 9 situation, what or how much in-person campaigning will happen this fail, but I’m undoubtedly willing to help as much as possible.

If Joe becomes President, do you jam-pack your luggage for another eight years? That would end up being the longest stint for any photographer at the White House.

I’m not positive, but I belief my old boss Pete Souza worked for most of President Reagan’s two words as well as all eight years of the Obama administration.

That said, right now I’m focused on sharing with the American people who the Joe Biden I got to know during my eight years at the White House is, and trying my best to help him to be elected … I don’t have any plans for January.

What do you shoot for recreation?

I love do photographs of the outdoors, hiking, and tenting. I’ve recently had an older camera converted to black& grey infrared that I’ve been sort of play games with a little bit.

Vice President Joe Biden talks to National Security Advisor Tony Blinken as he territory at Pristina Airport in Kosovo, Friday, May 22, 2009.( White House Photo by David Lienemann)

What advice would you have for aspiring photographers who want to be a White House photographer?

I think having a relevant portfolio of likeness is helpful. I’d certainly cover boasts and smashing bulletin and interesting thing. I had devoted a year photographing politics before I got the job.

I also think being professional, able to dress well and predict the chamber are also hugely important skills, some of which I was better at than others when I started working there.

You can find more of David Lienemann’s work on his website and Instagram , where he is posting a photo a date, some from the book, up until the election.

About the author: Phil Mistry is a photographer and teacher based in Atlanta, GA. He started one of the first digital camera categorizes in New York City at The International Center of Photography in the 90 s. He was the chairman and teacher for Sony/ Popular Photography magazine’s Digital Days Workshops. You can reach him via email here.

Image ascribes: Little Brown& Co. and David Lienemann and used with permission. Photo of David Lienemann by Lawrence Jackson.

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