KEY POINTS:
When I called Callie Shell just before Christmas at her home in Charleston, South Carolina, she was warm and chatty and spent 10 minutes telling me it was an exaggeration to say she'd had greater access to Barack Obama than any other photographer.
"I'd never say that," she
said. "It sounds so pompous."
But when I tried to get hold of her last week with a query, she was impossible to pin down. I opened my paper and realised why.
Here were the Obamas in the Hay-Adams hotel in Washington getting their daughters ready for their first day at school, and here was the photo caption: Callie Shell.
After following the entire campaign for Time magazine, she's now documenting the transition and her role as the family's semi-official private photographer seems to have been put on to a more official footing.
As chance would have it, the first photos she ever took of him were when she was on assignment to photograph somebody else. It was 2004 and Time had sent her to follow the John Kerry campaign. It was in a holding room at a rally in Chicago that she came across the then little-known senator.
"He was just there as one of the speakers. But you couldn't not notice him. He was very funny, very good-looking, very well-spoken. He just seemed at ease with the world around him. He had everything. And people in the room really reacted to him.
"It also happened that he was standing in a much better light than John Kerry and so I did portraits of him and sent them in and my editor was like, 'Who's this?' And I'm like, 'He's this guy from Chicago but
I think he's more than just your local Chicago politician.' And then he made the speech at the Democratic convention and we all knew who he was from that point."
Shell lobbied to do a story on him in 2006 which eventually became a cover piece, and it was the rapport she built up during that time that has stood her in such good stead. She got to know him before the campaign madness and its attendant security requirements took over.
When it kicked off in earnest, she went back on the road with him and the result is perhaps one of the most intimate set of portraits there is of the president-elect - catching a quick nap on the campaign bus, relaxing with his children, snatching a moment alone with his wife, Michelle.
"His campaign team were amazing. They never said, 'you can't take a photo of that'. And we just got on really well. He has two children, I have one - his daughter and my son are almost the same age. And he's really funny. He's the first politician that I've covered that was the same age as me - we're only six months apart - so I related more than I ever have done before."
Other photographers were given backstage access too, "but I just think for some reason we get along - and his wife and I get along really well, too. She's fantastic."
"And it's nice to have somebody who, when you miss your child, or when you're just tired of the whole thing, he relates to that. He really doesn't want somebody who every time they see him says, 'oh, you're so fantastic and wonderful'. Michelle, she's his greatest support but at the same time, she probably gives him the hardest time of anybody."
The response to her photos has, she says, been overwhelming. "People tell me how much my photos have touched them, how much they mean to them. But it's not my photos, it's really not. It's him. It's Obama."
- OBSERVER
