Photographer discusses famous 2012 shot of pizza shop owner bear-hugging President Obama (VIDEO)
posted Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 12:26 PM EDT
An image of a Florida pizza shop owner bear-hugging President Obama became one of the defining photos of the 2012 campaign and photographer Saul Loeb of Agence France-Presse was there to capture it. Loeb gives the backstory on the image in a new video from Think Tank Photo's excellent web series, "About A Photograph." (We've embedded the clip below.)
Loeb notes in the video that the owner of the Big Apple Pizza shop in Fort Pierce, FL, Scott Van Duzer was a registered Republican and "a very big guy." The situation was unusual, to say the least, which made the Secret Service a bit edgy at the time but also helped produce a memorable photo.
"You can cover the White House for twenty years and never see someone pick up the President of the United States," Loeb says in the video. "We just couldn't believe what we were seeing and what we were photographing. You hope that the picture is in focus and you hope you got the best frame you can. Because you realize, as you're photographing it, that this is going to be the photo of the day, this is going to be the photo of the trip, and it could end up being a defining picture of the campaign season."
(Via ISO 1200)