Seeking like-minded tourists, White House lifts photo ban on tours
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Version 0 of 1. For more than four decades, a White House tour was a hushed event, where visitors moved at timed intervals through the executive residence, their cameras in their pockets, taking in the portraits of past presidents, the antique furniture and the color of the drapes. That changed Wednesday when the Obama administration not only announced that photos are now allowed, but encouraged people to share them online. By the end of the day, social media was flooded with quirky images from the White House: a travel blogger in a dinosaur shirt holding up a selfie with a partly rolled-up red carpet in the Cross Hall behind him, a close-up of the brocade arm of a sofa in the Green Room and many pictures of the first family’s two dogs. The move was, in part, a practical one: The restrictions had been imposed out of concern that flash photography could damage historic artwork, but that is no longer a danger in the age of cellphone cameras. But it also fit neatly into the administration’s broader effort to inject itself into the social media bloodstream. Even first lady Michelle Obama’s official announcement Wednesday about the policy change seemed aimed at going viral: On her office’s official Instagram account, a 15-second video shows her ripping up a sign prohibiting the taking of photos or the use of social media on the White House grounds as she laughs and makes her own sound effects. The clip highlighted the underlying purpose of the policy shift: In the digital age, going viral is the whole point. [Obama, the first social media president] The debut of the policy change was carefully scripted: Several dozen people with broad followings on Instagram were invited to the White House a week ago to take the first tours on which photography was permitted. The Obamas’ dogs, Sunny and Bo, were on hand to pose for guests. “It was a bit of a surreal experience,” said Zach Glassman, a Brooklyn-based freelance photographer and author of the blog Passion Passport, who has nearly 230,000 followers on his personal Instagram account and 260,000 followers on his professional account. Glassman even had a chance to snuggle with Bo — “He was incredibly soft” — but the group was encouraged to move on from the canines. “Naturally, I would have spent quite some time with them,” he said. Tourists snapped photos of Bo and Sunny, while some of the invited guests took pictures of them photographing the Portuguese water dogs. May-May Horcasitas, who lives in South Beach, Fla., and is originally from Hong Kong, took photos on her phone of the first lady’s video detailing the new policy. “Let me get a shot of that,” she exclaimed. Under the new rules, phones and compact still cameras with lenses no longer than three inches are allowed, while video cameras, cameras with detachable lenses, tablets, tripods, monopods and camera “selfie” sticks are still off-limits. Live-streaming and flash photography also are still banned. Those constraints did nothing to curb the giddy reaction on social media. The hashtag #WhiteHouseTour took off on Twitter, garnering more than 1,000 mentions by the early afternoon. White House tours themselves have made a comeback recently. The government suspended the visits in March 2013, saying that constraints Congress imposed on the Secret Service’s budget made it impossible for the agency to conduct background checks on so many visitors. The tours resumed on a limited basis in November that year, and about 558,000 people toured the White House last year. But there is little mistaking the importance of social media to this White House. On Wednesday afternoon, while traveling in Nashville, President Obama held a virtual town hall meeting via Twitter. He took questions about health care, expressed firm opposition to peas as an ingredient in guacamole and discussed his current taste in music: “was listening to outkast/liberation and the black keys/lonely boy this morning,” he tweeted. The White House has been working “for quite a while” on changing the no-photography policy, said an aide to the first lady. The White House lifted it a few years ago for its annual holiday tours, the aide added, and it has never applied to guests at the White House’s holiday parties. On at least a couple of occasions, selfie sticks have made it into the White House: when Obama posed with one for a BuzzFeed video in February, and when the White House held an Instagram meetup on March 21, which the president’s official photographer, Pete Souza, attended. Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University in Maryland, said the move is likely to help visitors bond a little more with what is sometimes called “the People’s House.” She recalled seeing several African American visitors pose in front of “The Builders,” a 1947 painting by renowned black artist Jacob Lawrence, which was placed in the Green Room in 2007. As a museum, Kumar noted, the White House “has significance for people. . . . In families, these will be pictures that will be treasured.” The new policy still does not allow tourists to go wandering into the Situation Room or the family’s private living quarters. And it does not address the concerns of those who complain that the administration has generally been too secretive in how it governs. “In the transparency line, this is low-hanging fruit,” Kumar observed. Tevi Troy, who worked in the White House under George W. Bush and wrote the book, “What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House,” noted in an e-mail that the dangers of the shift “are probably minimal,” given that the White House has been widely photographed and tourists don’t usually interact with the first family or staff. Still, it’s tempting for some to imagine what could have happened if tourists were taking photos unfettered through the decades. “If people had cameras on tours in previous White Houses, perhaps we could have seen women sneaking in to see Jack Kennedy, or Dwight Eisenhower trotting out to his putting green,” Troy speculated. Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people who toured the White House last year. It was about 558,000, not 55,000. |