KEY POINTS:
When a young student calling himself Barry Obama showed up at a small university in Los Angeles in 1980, he had one thing on his mind - meeting girls.
The keen basketball player, body surfer and party animal from his carefree schoolboy days in Hawaii discovered that the
girls on this campus were not into jocks. So he dropped out of Occidental University's basketball team and acquired a new persona. Barry would disappear off the face of the earth to be replaced by Barack.
It was about this time that he was approached by Lisa Jack, an aspiring photographer. She asked him if he would pose for some photographs that she could use in her portfolio. Their first meeting was at a campus canteen and Jack recalls only that "he was really cute. But what else does a 20-year-old girl remember?"
He showed up for the shoot in a Panama hat and leather jacket and posed for a series of photographs. In one, he is sitting on a bed like a young Jimi Hendrix. In others he looks like the writer he once thought of becoming, a cigarette between his lips.
For 28 years the photos were lost and it was only when Jack was goaded by a sceptical friend that she decided to hunt down the negatives. She had never believed that the pictures in her basement would ever have a life outside her student-era darkroom. But when she found the negatives, the images of the confident-looking young Obama "blew me away".
"You can see he is just posing, initially, but as the shoot goes on, he starts to come out," she told Time magazine, which yesterday named Obama its Person of 2008. "He was very charismatic even then," she added.
Time picked Obama "for having the confidence to sketch an ambitious future in a gloomy hour, and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful he might pull it off".
The President-elect beat competition from the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, the creative force behind the Beijing Olympics, Zhang Yimou, and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin.
"In one of the craziest elections in American history, he overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th President of the US," Time said.
With the campaign raging, Jack worried that her pictures might be used in attack ads by Obama's rivals. So she rented a safety-deposit box and put the negatives there to be opened after the election. Before that they had been left to moulder in her basement, she having long ago abandoned her ambitions of becoming a photographer and turned instead to psychology.
Jack hopes the photos reveal a "spirit of fun and thoughtfulness" of the man who is soon to occupy the Oval Office. "I'm not political," she says, "[but] these are historic photos and they should be shared."
THE INAUGURATION
The security:
* The Secret Service is in charge of inauguration security for January 20.
* More than 11,000 troops will provide air defences and medical and other support.
* About 7500 active duty military and roughly 4000 National Guard troops will participate.
* There will be around 4000 local police, 4000 police from around the country and security agents from other Government agencies.
The programme:
* Aretha Franklin will sing, Pastor Rick Warren will pray.
* Yo-Yo Ma will play the cello with violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Gabriela Montero and clarinettist Anthony McGill for a new work composed by John Williams.
* Also featured will be poet Elizabeth Alexander; the Rev Joseph Lowery, a veteran civil rights leader; and the US Marine and Navy bands.
* President-elect Barack Obama will take the oath from Chief Justice John Roberts.
*Vice-President-elect Joe Biden will take his oath from Justice John Paul Stevens.
- INDEPENDENT
