President Obama as "The Freshman" (PHOTOS)

Photos show President Barack Obama as Barry the freshman

Lisa Jack took pictures of the future president when he was an Occidental College student.
By Mike Boehm

May 27, 2009

A public that wants to know everything about Barack Obama can thank Lisa Jack for a glimpse of what the future president was like when he was just another college freshman trying to cut a figure in this world -- with a partly unbuttoned Oxford shirt, a big Panama hat and puffs of cigarette smoke as his props of choice for projecting that coveted aura of post-adolescent confidence and cool. ¶ Obama can thank Jack for keeping the roll of photographs she took of him in 1980 out of circulation until he was elected. Nine were first published in Time magazine's December "Person of the Year" spread on Obama; now 21 of the 36 photos, plus a blow-up of her original contact sheet, make up "Barack Obama: The Freshman," an exhibition opening Thursday at M+B Gallery in West Hollywood. ¶ Jack rummaged for the long-ignored negatives in her Minneapolis basement early in 2008, after it became clear Obama was a serious contender for the presidency. The callow kid kicking back on a couch in a living room near L.A.'s Occidental College, where he and Jack were students, may not have been the image the Obama campaign wanted to project.

"I'm sure Hillary would have paid a fortune for them: 'Is this who you want picking up the phone at 3 a.m.?' " Jack said from Minneapolis, her discourse earthy, humorous and freewheeling, sometimes salty. "I could have made a boatload of money, probably, but I wanted to do it right."

Jack, now a psychology professor and therapist, can thank Obama for putting her back on her road not taken. She says a lack of money forced her to pass up graduate studies in photography; instead she went into banking, then branched into psychology. While earning a doctorate from USC, Jack did an internship in Minneapolis and stayed on there, launching a private practice and teaching at Augsburg College. After her unexpected debut show opens, she's eager to test her eye again with other photo projects.

"I'm the 49-year-old woman who wanted to be a photographer but didn't follow through. I'm the Susan Boyle of the photography world."

Her life and Obama's intersected at the Cooler, a campus snack shop.

The young woman from Rye, N.Y., loved her psychology courses but cared enough about photography to find mentors on the faculty who tutored her in independent study courses. With a blanket thrown over the couch she recalls as "a plaid horrible thing," the living room of the apartment she shared in a nondescript quadruplex near the campus in Eagle Rock became Jack's makeshift photo studio. Students from her circle of friends and acquaintances would pose for portraits that she would hand in as her weekly assignments.

That day a friend was telling her about a student named Barry she ought to photograph "because he's so cute." Moments later, the man himself walked in. He agreed to the shoot.

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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-obama-photos27-2009may27,0,5574190.story