President Bush: Look Him Right In The Eye

To get his current job, White House photographer Eric Draper says he borrowed a page from the president’s own playbook.

Interviewed this month in the photography magazine PBase, Draper reveals that after covering the 2000 campaign and recount as an Associated Press shutterman, he was invited to a Christmas party in Austin, Texas, thrown by the not-yet-inaugurated George W. Bush.

“I walked up to him at the party, at the end, and actually used the president’s approach where I looked him in the eye and asked him for the job,” Draper tells interviewer Eric Kuhn. “That was one of his sayings during the campaign. So I looked him in the eye and I said, ‘I want to be your personal photographer.’ … I don’t know if it helped, but a week later I got a call from [then-Chief of Staff] Andy Card.”

A Washington neophyte when he arrived, he said the thing that keeps him here is seeing his way through the entire two terms: “I started the story from day one the minute I captured an image of the president leaving Texas, before the inauguration. … I would like to capture the end of the story, which is the president walking out of the Oval Office for the last time.”

Oh, and he uses Canon cameras.