Getting Up Close

By Richard Lacayo

Don't suppose that Robert Capa's famous advice to photojournalists--"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough"--applies only to the battlefield. There are few tanks better armored these days than most celebrities, who are fully prepared to fend off all attempts to see any side of them but the faces they want you to see. And what is the President if not a celebrity operating at the highest levels of consequence? So one thing TIME's Diana Walker can tell you is that a successful White House photographer is one who is close enough in all senses.

Which means? Among other things it means hanging with the big guy long enough to gain his trust and reading his depths with your own kind of sonar. It also means being around so much that when the time comes, you are up close in Capa's sense--in the room, on the scene, there--when the President of the United States of America finally shakes off the psychological grip of his handlers and his security wedge and his tireless self-awareness and makes some gesture or expression that is not in the fat playbook of official gestures and expressions. At which point the scrupulously prepared, emotionally intrepid photographer--we're talking here about Walker--gets the pleasure of hearing the shutter click like a purse being closed with a pearl inside.

Now Walker has strung those pearls together in a new book, Public and Private: Twenty Years Photographing the Presidency (National Geographic/Insight; 200 pages). Most of the photos have appeared in TIME, but some (like the two photos of Clinton on these pages) have never been published before. She knows how to give great men and women their due when 21 guns are saluting. But she also sees them as they appear when Hail to the Chief isn't playing and nobody is looking. Or nobody but her. --By Richard Lacayo