Long before he worked in the White House alongside two U.S. presidents, Pete Souza was working on The Kansas State Collegian’s staff.
“I did my undergraduate at Boston University in public communication,” Souza said. “In the last couple of years, I was very involved in learning photography, but I couldn’t get a job when I left BU, so I took a year to work for my uncle’s business, which had nothing to do with photography or journalism. Then I decided to go to grad school.”
After this year away from journalism, Souza found his way back to the field. This time, right in the heart of the Midwest.
“I think one of the reasons I was convinced to drive halfway across the country to Kansas was Don Holt,” Souza said, recalling the K-State professor who recruited him. “He went on and on about how great The Kansas State Collegian was and how I could work for them as a photographer. All of that kind of mixed together to appeal to me.”
Souza served his first year on staff as a staff photographer before becoming the photo editor for the paper.
“I think my favorite memories were the conversations that took place about which photo was going to be on the front page,” he said. “There was competition among the photographers, but also collaboration. Those late nights in the newsroom really shaped me.”
One of those late nights stands out in Souza’s memory.
“I remember getting into a big argument with the editor over which photo should go on the front page,” Souza said, laughing. “We missed deadline, the AP wire machine was turned off, and the janitor walked in and said, ‘Did you hear the Pope died?’ We turned the machine back on, and we were the only paper in Kansas to have that story on the front page the next morning.”
One of Souza’s biggest learning experiences while at K-State came to him through a project on the Stonehouse Daycare Center in Manhattan.
“That experience really taught me patience and waiting for moments,” Souza said. “It taught me to become what I call, invisibly present … where people know you’re there but they forget about you. We’re investing time and always being around. Those are the kind of pictures that I have ended up doing throughout my career.”
Within the next four years, Souza’s path took him from small-town Kansas newspapers to the Chicago Sun-Times and then to the White House.
“It was kind of a heady experience,” he said. “I say to folks that, ‘it’s not like you walk into the Oval Office and suddenly you become a different kind of photographer because you don’t. You’re still trying to capture moments. You’re still trying to make press the shutter at just the right time. You’re still trying to make an interesting composition with your camera.”
Eventually, Souza’s work became memorable. His work with President Obama captured candid, human and deeply emotional moments. But he said that those images traced their roots right back to K-State.
“I probably learned more from Bill Brown’s red ink than anything in the two years I was at K-State,” Souza said, referring to the longtime director of student publications. “Every morning he’d markup a copy of the paper with notes and leave it in the newsroom. Everyone read it. Everyone wanted to know what Mr. Brown thought. That kind of critique made me better.”
His advice for the future generations of photojournalists echos the lessons that shaped his early years in the newsroom in Kedzie Hall — practice relentlessly and welcome critiques.
“Photography isn’t like riding a bike,” he said. “You can’t just go a year without doing it and expect it to be the same. You can go a year without jumping on a bicycle and you’ll know how to pedal, you know how to make it work. It’s not the same with photography. I think with photography you’ve got to do it. It’s the same with writing. You have to learn from your mistakes and have people critique your work. You need to have professionals give you some really hard advice and hard critique. I think that’s how you get better.”
