One thing that's been remarkable about photographing President Obama over the past few years is the number of requests I get from people who want to use a photo as a basis for a drawing or painting, especially this one. With that in mind, I thought I'd post a few of the images I've been sent from artists as well as a video of someone drawing the image (flipped horizontally).


Painting by Merry Jaye


drawing by France Belleville



2/1/09 Update:

Painting by Patty Vicknair

As another photographer remarked to me over dinner last night, we finally have our city back. The piles of trash has been cleaned up, the real stories about Purplegate are emerging, and the 18 hour days of photography are over. As I caught up with the administrative work that had been set aside for the last week, I received the latest tearsheet in the mail from a BusinessWeek shoot in DC. It's a rare thing for a photo editor to choose my favorite image from a shoot for the story, and even rarer for it to happen a second time as it did with this shoot and a previous shoot with Greg Lennon and I'm thankful for the great tear sheets afforded by that. Here are a few more from the shoot that I liked.

It's been a long day - I got up at 3AM to get down to the Capitol. Here are a few of my favorites from the day.

No plans to turn this into a photo blog, but I saw this on a shoot this week for the Smithsonian and just loved the scene.

Over the past few months, I've been making trips up to Philadelphia to document a groundbreaking, experimental study being done by doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. All of the patients involved in the study have lost most of their sight due to a specific genetic disorder called Leber's congenital amaurosis. By injecting a corrected version of the DNA into the patient's eye, the doctor's hope that they might be able to reverse the genetic condition and restore the patient's sight.

The study is led by the husband and wife team of Albert Maguire and Jean Bennett, who couldn't have been more accommodating in letting me document everything from the last, teary moments an eight year old boy spent with his parents before going into the operating room, to the actual surgery, which is hours long and involves some precision cuts to the eye before the new genetic material goes in.

From a personal perspective, this was one of the most difficult assignments I did this year and I'm really hopeful for all the patients I met, that the new DNA will take hold and help them see better. From a professional perspective, it was wonderful being paired with the very talented Jocelyn Kaiser who wrote the story and I'm not sure I've ever had so many images from a single assignment run in the magazine. Jocelyn's article can be read here.